Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-07-02/SPV

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Volume 3, Issue 27	2 July 2007	About the Signpost

(← Prev)	2007 archives	(Next →)

IP unwittingly predicts murder of wrestler: "Awful coincidence"	Board election series: Elections open
German chapter relaunches website, arranges government support	WikiWorld comic: "Cashew"
Features and admins	Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
The Report on Lengthy Litigation


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IP unwittingly predicts death: "Awful coincidence"

By Thespian, 2 July 2007

In an "awful coincidence", an anonymous editor edited the page of wrestler Chris Benoit to state that his wife had died, nearly fourteen hours before the bodies of Benoit and his wife and son were found. After the edit was widely reported, the IP user confessed to the edits, saying that the edits were part of an unsubstantiated rumor that was "a terrible coincidence".

The edit in question, on Chris Benoit, indicated that he had missed an event on Saturday because of the death of his wife, Nancy Benoit. The edit was made just after midnight on June 25th, between thirteen and fourteen hours before the deaths were discovered by Atlanta Police in Fayetteville, an Atlanta suburb.^[1]^[2] JAB5 reverted that, saying "Need a reliable source. Saying that his wife died is a pretty big statement, you need to back it up with something." One hour after the initial edit, an Australian IP address reinserted the rumour, attributing it to wrestling discussion sites. That edit was also reverted with a requirement for more solid citations.^[3] On the 26th, Lid went through the history of the Chris Benoit article, and noted the edit, bringing it to the attention of the Administrator's Noticeboard.^[4]

The initial IP address to post about Nancy Benoit's death happened to be located in Stamford, Connecticut, the home of the corporate headquarters of the WWE, which led some people to speculate that the IP editor had 'inside information'. However, in light of the IP address having a history of vandalism to other wrestling articles, SirFozzie said, "If you look at the IP's other edits, it's pretty obvious that this was just a garden variety vandal whose vandalization sadly proved true."

Wikinews reported the story on the 28th of June.^[5] Wikinews was the first major news source to report on the issue; interestingly, Fox News carried the story, copying part of the story verbatim from the Wikinews site, and citing it to "Wikipedia.org".^[6] Fox News labeled their story 'exclusive' at the time, but has since removed that tag.

As a result of the widespread coverage and speculation, investigators announced that they were going to be looking into possible connections between text messages that Benoit sent to his coworkers and friends, and the edit to Wikipedia.^[7] News talk shows such as Bill O'Reilly (with guest Geraldo Rivera) made suppositions on their show, with Rivera saying it was "wildly improbable", and an "unthinkable coincidence" that the unidentified editor would get it right without knowing the truth. Greta Van Susteren suggested that the post might indicate that someone else was on site before the police were, and the existence of the posting opened up the possibility of a 'triple murder'.^[8] John Gibson referred to the edits as "a brand new Wikipedia shocker", and "spooky".^[8] Nancy Grace and her guests suggested it was possible that Benoit may even have made the edit himself, and discussed the possibility that he told someone who then posted it, instead of reporting it to authorities.^[9]

On the 29th, in the wake of the media coverage, a post was made to the talk post of Wikinews coverage of the Wikipedia posting.^[10] This post, coming from the same Stamford IP as the initial post on the Benoit page, declared, "Last weekend, I had heard about Chris Benoit no showing ... because of a family emergency, and I had heard rumors about why that was. I was reading rumors and speculation about this matter online, and one of them included that his wife may have passed away, and I did the wrong thing by posting it on wikipedia to spite (sic) there being no evidence." Further acknowledging the issues that were brought up, he admitted "I feel terrible about the mainstream coverage this has received...hearing about my message becoming a huge part of the Benoit slayings made me feel terrible as everyone believes that it is connected to the tragedy, but it was just an awful coincidence."

He added, "Like I said it was just a major coincidence, and I will never vandalize anything on wikipedia or post wrongful information."

References

Board elections open

By Ral315, 2 July 2007

2007 Board of Trustees elections A Wikipedia Signpost series

June 11	Candidacies open
June 18	Election information
June 25	Candidate interviews
July 2	Elections open
July 9	Elections closed
July 16	Election results

This week, the Signpost covers the opening of this year's Board elections.

The Wikimedia Board Elections opened on Thursday, and run through Saturday, July 7, at 23:59 UTC. About 2,300 ballots had been cast (or about 2,000 unique votes) as of press time, with over half of those votes being cast on the first day of voting. It is anticipated that results will be announced within a few days of the closure of voting.

The Signpost election guide is still available; the questions and answers can be found here. About half of the candidates have responded to the questions so far.

Balloting is being held on the secure server of Software in the Public Interest, a non-profit organization known for its relationship with the open source community. According to a post on SPI's website, SPI Vice-President Michael Schultheiss will tally the votes.

Next week: Closure of the elections; results may or may not have been announced at this time.

German chapter relaunches website, arranges government support

By Michael Snow, 2 July 2007

Wikimedia Deutschland, the German local Wikimedia chapter, was involved in arranging a deal for government funding to help improve the German Wikipedia, which has gained a fair amount of attention and crossed over into English-language media. It also last week relaunched a website that figured in an earlier incident putting the chapter in the public spotlight.

Government funding

The money in question comes from the German Ministry of Nutrition, Agriculture, and Consumer Protection, which funds a renewable resources agency (Fachagentur Nachwachsende Rohstoffe) to conduct research in that field. Determining that many key topics on renewable resources had little or no coverage in the German Wikipedia, it agreed to work with the Nova Institute, a private-sector organization, to put together articles in this area.

As explained by Florian Gerlach, project coordinator for the Nova Institute, the plan is for experts to work with a Wikimedia liaison who will help them improve Wikipedia content. Although the active development of Wikipedia articles is still a little way off, one of the first steps is supposed to be launching a WikiProject on renewable resources.

Website relaunch

A launch that has already taken place, also involving the German chapter, is that of one of its websites. As a local chapter authorized to use Wikimedia trademarks, Wikimedia Deutschland controls the country-specific domain for Wikipedia in Germany, wikipedia.de. On Tuesday, it relaunched this domain as a search portal for Wikipedia.

The new site allows visitors to enter a term and choose one of four options to search for that term in the German Wikipedia. The options include Wikipedia's own search function, and due to longstanding complaints about the quality of that search engine, alternative search results from three other sources. These include internet portal Web.de and search engine Exalead, both of which have launched Wikipedia-specific search products in the past year, along with T-Online, Germany's largest ISP (and also a major supporter with a donation of 20,000 euros to the chapter last month).

In the past, the domain has mostly been used simply to take visitors directly to the German Wikipedia. For a few months last year, the chapter had to change this use due to a preliminary court injunction. During the case, which was brought by the parents of deceased hacker Tron, the domain instead hosted a notice informing visitors of the lawsuit and instructing them that the German Wikipedia was at de.wikipedia.org. When the chapter prevailed on appeal, it was able to restore the domain to its previous use.

WikiWorld comic: "Cashew"

By Greg Williams, 2 July 2007

This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Cashew". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.


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Features and admins

By OSX, July 2, 2007

One portal was promoted to featured status last week: Portal:Dinosaurs (nom).

No topics or sounds were promoted to featured status last week.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Slayer, Wonderbra, Shuttle-Mir Program, New Jersey Devils, Islam, and Search engine optimization.

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Aviator, Tomato, The Starry Night, Egeskov Castle, Red-necked Grebe, Territorial evolution of Canada, and Swedish Rally.

Five pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.

Crying Sudeten woman saluting Hitler, 1938	Jorge de Aguiar compass rose	Chinese child soldier, Burma 1944
Punch Rhodes Colossus	Portland Skyline

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

By ais523, 2 July 2007

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.13alpha (r36195), and changes with a version number higher than that will not yet be active.

Fixed bugs

The limit on signature length has been changed to 255 characters, rather than 255 bytes. (Many non-English characters take up 2 or 3 bytes of UTF-8, and therefore the limit was effectively lower for usernames containing such characters before this change.) (r23389, bug 10338)
Permanent links now work correctly in all cases if they refer to a page which was renamed. (Previously the links would fail if the redirect created by the move was deleted.) (r23445, bug 10377)
It's now impossible to accidentally revert a page to a version in a different page's history (to do this deliberately, copying-and-pasting is now required). (r23483, bug 7071)
The fallback used when the AJAX watch function fails to watch properly via AJAX now actually works. (r23506, bug 10397)
A new interface message MediaWiki:Movepage-moved has been introduced to replace MediaWiki:Pagemovedtext, due to problems with the parameters in the old message. (r23513, bug 10401)
Categories now page correctly in cases when several entries in the category have the same sortkey. (r23016, bug 10280)
The help message for api.php, when specifically requested via action=help, now displays no matter what the output format. (r23566, bug 10931)
The user creation log for a user (for instance, following Wikipedia:Request an account requests) has been fixed to reflect the contributions of the created user when colouring the contributions link (r23447, bug 10360), not those of the user creating the account

New features

Special:ExpandTemplates now includes a preview of the text being expanded. (r23441, bug 7172)
An action=help&version query on api.php now returns the MediaWiki version number in addition to the information it previously returned. (r23502, bug 10392)
Several changes were made to the way user and sitewide .js and .css pages were rendered; discussion about these changes was still ongoing at press time (some of the requests for changes to how they were rendered were contradictory; there have been requests both for the pages to display as fully syntax-highlighted JavaScript or CSS, and for the pages to be parsed entirely as normal wikimarkup, with various intermediate suggestions also having been made). Relevant bug numbers: 10196, 10314, 10410, 10422.

Other technology news

The secure server, https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Main_Page, has been given a new security certificate that should be recognized automatically by browsers without an error message.
The search feature accessed by default using Special:Search and/or the 'Search' button in the sidebar has been upgraded. New features include understanding redirects (redirects contribute to the score of their target and do not appear in the results), scoring based partly on the linkedness of articles, searching outside the article namespace directly from the search box (to do this, type the namespace name and a colon immediately before the search term, or all: to search all namespaces), the capability to search for accented titles by typing an unaccented version or common transliteration, and the ability to search for numbers. [1]
There is ongoing discussion about the location and appearance of section edit links, due to usability problems reported with the current arrangement. [2]

Ongoing news

Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla.

The Report on Lengthy Litigation

By David Mestel, 2 July 2007

The Arbitration Committee opened two new cases this week, and closed three cases.

Closed cases

Transnistria: A case involving the actions of MariusM (talk · contribs) and William Mauco (talk · contribs) on Transnistria-related articles. MariusM alleged that Mauco (who did not make a statement) had engaged in sockpuppetry, edit warring and other misconduct. As a result of the case, MarkStreet (talk · contribs), William Mauco (talk · contribs) and EvilAlex (talk · contribs) were indefinitely banned from any editing related to Transnistria.

Badlydrawnjeff: A highly controversial case involving the actions of Badlydrawnjeff, Doc glasgow, Tony Sidaway and JzG in relation inter alia to the article known as QZ, which underwent an AfD which was closed as delete by Drini, but overturned on DRV by Xoloz. The resulting AfD was then speedily closed by Thebainer. Badlydrawnjeff then filed for a deletion review, which was speedily closed or removed by a number of administrators and others consecutively, including JzG, Doc Glasgow and Tony Sidaway, and the closures often reverted or new DRVs opened. There is dispute as to whether the actions of all parties were within process, and whether, as some believe, WP:BLP takes priority over DRV. A peripheral issue to the case is a 60-hour block of Badlydrawnjeff by Zsinj, apparently after discussions on the admin IRC channel, although some have stated that the consensus on the channel did not favour the block. The block was quickly undone by Gaillimh. Additionally, some allege that Violetriga acted improperly in undeleting some articles deleted under BLP. As a result of the case, principles were passed to the effect that the overriding principle with respect to BLPs should be "do no harm", and that suspected violations may be speedy deleted, but that these may be contested through the normal channels, although they must not be restored until consensus has formed to do so, and remedies cautioning or admonishing Violetriga and Night Gyr to avoid undeleting content deleted under BLP. Badlydrawnjeff was cautioned "to adhere to the letter and the spirit of the Biographies of Living Persons policy".

E104421-Tajik: A case involving the actions of E104421 and Tajik. The case had been suspended to allow a referral to Community enforceable mediation, but the mediation broke down after Tajik was alleged to have edited through sockpuppets while claiming to be away and unavailable for the mediation. As a result of the case, Tajik was banned for one year, and his community ban was endorsed, and AzaToth was reminded that Wikipedia operates by consensus.

New cases

CharlotteWebb: A case involving the revelation by Jayjg on the RfA of CharlotteWebb (which then failed), that she used TOR to edit, and her subsequent behaviour.

Armenia-Azerbaijan 2: A case following on from one previous, involving various Armenian and Azerbaijani editors.

Evidence phase

Zacheus-jkb: A case involving the actions of -jkb- and Zacheus. Jkb alleges that Zacheus has published personal data on him, and has made legal threats. Zacheus denies the allegations, and Thatcher131 alleges on the talkpage that jkb has himself revealed personal information on Zacheus.

Miskin: A case involving the actions of Miskin (talk · contribs), who was controversially blocked by Swatjester (talk • contribs • blocks • protects • deletions • moves • rights) for one month (later reduced to one week) for alleged revert warring.

Voting phase

Abu badali: A case alleging that Abu badali (talk · contribs) has disruptively tagged non-free images for deletion, even when a valid fair-use justification exists, and has harassed editors who have complained about this behavior. Abu badali denies the allegations. Fred Bauder has proposed a remedy, supported by Kirill Lokshin, placing Abu badali on probation for one year.

NYScholar: A case involving the actions of a number of users, including NYScholar (talk · contribs) and Notmyrealname (talk · contribs), in relation to the Lewis Libby article. Remedies granting an amnesty for past edit warring, but providing that further misconduct may be sanctioned by any uninvolved administrator.

PalestineRemembered: A case involving the actions of PalestineRemembered (talk · contribs), referred from the Community sanction noticeboard. Kirill Lokshin has proposed a motion to dismiss, with the support of four arbitrators.

Piotrus: A case involving Piotrus (talk • contribs • blocks • protects • deletions • moves • rights) and other editors on Central and Eastern Europe-related articles. Multiple parties accuse others of edit warring, incivility, unethical behavior and biased editing. (An earlier arbitration case, Piotrus-Ghirla, was dismissed without prejudice, in part due to inactivity of Ghirlandajo (talk · contribs), who was listed as a party in the new case.) An amnesty for past behaviour in editing disputes on articles relating to Eastern Europe has the support of three arbitrators. Voting on other remedies is split.

Paranormal: A case involving the actions of various users, especially as regards bias and attribution, on "articles on paranormal and pseudoscientific topics", such as parapsychology and Electronic voice phenomenon. Proposals limiting editors on articles relating to the paranormal to one revert (other than of simple vandalism) per week, and cautioning Dradin and Kazuba have the support of four to five arbitrators; voting on other remedies is split.

Hkelkar 2: A case involving the actions of Rama's Arrow (talk • contribs • blocks • protects • deletions • moves • rights), Bakasuprman (talk · contribs), Dangerous-Boy (talk · contribs) and Sbhushan (talk · contribs), Rama's Arrow alleges that the others acted as meatpuppets of banned user Hkelkar, and blocked them for six months. They deny the allegations, and allege that Rama's Arrow acted improperly in blocking them, and in posting private e-mails to the incidents noticeboard. Various remedies have been proposed including an early proposal to impose no sanctions on any of the parties but calling on the parties to enter into mediation, based on a finding of fact noting a lack of reliable evidence in the case, but a proposal to prohibit administrator actions between the parties has the support of seven arbitrators, and a recent proposal to desysop Rama's Arrow (who recently resigned adminship) stands at five-to-two. Voting on principles regarding the posting of private e-mails is split but it appears that a majority of arbitrators will support the principle that private e-mails may not be posted on-wiki without the consent of the sender.

Under review

Certified.Gangsta-Ideogram: A review of the Certified.Gangsta-Ideogram case. Ideogram and Sean William allege that Certified.Gangsta has engaged in tendentious editing since the main case.

Categories: Wikipedia Signpost archives 2007-07