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At this year's Wikimania, I [Brandon Harris] gave a talk entitled The Athena Project: Wikipedia in 2015. The talk broadly outlined several ideas the foundation is exploring for planned features, user interface changes, and workflow improvements. We expect that many of these changes will be welcomed, while others will be controversial. During the question-and-answer period, I was asked whether people should think of Athena as a skin, a project, or something else. I responded, "You should think of Athena as a kick in the head" – because that's exactly what it's supposed to be: a radical and bold re-examination of some of our sacred cows when it comes to the interface.
On August 1, the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) portal was launched on Meta. The FDC will implement the Wikimedia movement's new grant-orientated finance structure in accordance with the WMF board's recent resolutions. As a volunteer committee, the FDC will make recommendations to the WMF board on a $11.4 million budget for 2012–13.
Arbitrator Kirill Lokshin proposed a motion for a procedure on the alteration of an editor's previous username(s) in arbitration decisions to reflect their name change(s). ... The Devil's Advocate initiated an amendment request for the controversial Race and intelligence case.
This week the Signpost interviews Casliber, an editor who has written or contributed significantly to a startling 69 featured articles. We learn what makes him tick, why he edits, and why he can write on everything from vampires to dinosaurs, birds to plants. He also gives some advice to budding featured article writers.
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for July 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project). ... At least one fibre-optic cable was damaged at the WMF's Tampa site on August 6, leading to a sharp downwards spike in traffic lasting over an hour and almost three hours of disruption for readers around the globe.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Martial Arts. Since April 2004, the project has been the hub for discussion and improvement of martial arts articles, including all disciplines and national origins. The project maintains a variety of conventions for handling the names and descriptions of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Sikh, Filipino, Okinawan, and hybrid martial arts. WikiProject Martial Arts has spawned or absorbed several subprojects focusing on boxing, kickboxing, sumo, and mixed martial arts.
In a certain way, writing Wikipedia is the same everywhere, in every language or culture. You have to stick to the facts, aiming for the most objective way of describing them, including everything relevant and leaving out all the everyday trivia that is not really necessary to understand the context. You have to use critical thinking, trying to be independent of your own preferences and biases. To some effect, that's all there is to it. Naturally, Wikipedians have their biases, some of which can never be cured. Most Wikipedians tend to like encyclopedias; but millions of people in the world don't share that bias, and we represent them rather poorly. I'm also quite sure that an overwhelming majority of Wikipedia co-authors are literate. Again, that's not true for everyone in this world. Yet we have other, less noticeable but barely less fundamental biases.
The Bangla language, also known as Bengali, is spoken by some 200 million people in Bangladesh and India. The Bangla Wikipedia has a very small active community of about ten to fifteen very active editors, with another 35–40 as less active editors. The project faces particular challenges in being a small Wikipedia, and Dhaka-based WMF community fellow User:Tanvir Rahman is working to understand these challenges and to develop strategies that can improve small wikis that have strong potential to expand their editing communities.
Six featured articles were promoted this week, including Business US Highway 41, which was a state trunkline highway that served as a business loop in Marquette in the US state of Michigan.
Three weeks into a month-long evaluation of code review tool Gerrit, a serious alternative has finally gained traction in the review process: Facebook-developed but now independently operated Phabricator and its sister command-line tool Arcanist.
This week, we interviewed the lively bunch at WikiProject Dispute Resolution. Started in November 2011 to study and discuss improvements to Wikipedia's resources for resolving disputes between editors, the young project has supplemented dispute resolution efforts currently handled at the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard, Mediation Committee, and other venues. Over 40 editors have signed up to provide feedback, a variety of ideas have been proposed, and a manual for dispute resolution has been created.
We are currently running a study on the effects of adding additional information to SuggestBot’s recommendations. Participation in the study is voluntary. Should you wish to not participate in the study, or have questions or concerns, you can find contact information in the consent information sheet.
We have added information about the opportunity to make substantial valuable contributions to an article using a Low/Medium/High scale which goes from Low to High . The score is calculated by combining an article's readership and quality.
SuggestBot predicts that you will enjoy editing some of these articles. Have fun!
SuggestBot picks articles in a number of ways based on other articles you've edited, including straight text similarity, following wikilinks, and matching your editing patterns against those of other Wikipedians. It tries to recommend only articles that other Wikipedians have marked as needing work. We appreciate that you have signed up to receive suggestions regularly, your contributions make Wikipedia better — thanks for helping!
The Wikimedia Foundation sometimes proposes new features that receive substantive criticism from Wikimedians, yet those criticisms may be dismissed on the basis that people are resistant to change—there's an unjustified view that the wikis have been overrun by vested contributors who hate all change. That view misses a lot of key details and insight because there are good reasons that Wikimedians are suspicious of features development, given past and present development of bad software, growing ties with the problematic Wikia, and a growing belief that it is acceptable to experiment on users.
The Core Contest is a month-long competition among editors to improve Wikipedia's most important "core" articles—especially those that are in a relatively poor state. Core articles, such as Music, Computer, and Philosophy, tend to lie in the trunk of the tree of knowledge; by analogy, featured-and good-article processes generally attract more specialist topics out on the branches.
In the Utah Court of Appeals this week, the majority opinion in Fire Insurance Exchange v. Robert Allen Oltmanns and Brady Blackner relied on Wikipedia for the basic premise of their legal opinion, and included a concurring opinion devoted solely to the issue of citing Wikipedia in a legal opinion.
Thirteen featured articles were promoted this week, including pelicans, which are a genus of large water birds comprising the family Pelecanidae, characterised by a long beak and large throat-pouch. They have a fossil record dating back at least 30 million years and are most closely related to the Shoebill and Hammerkop. These fish-feeders have a patchy relationship with humans: the birds are sometimes persecuted and sometimes feature in mythology.
New embeddable scripting ("template replacement") language Lua received considerable scrutiny this week when it began its long road to widespread deployment, landing on the test2wiki test site on Wednesday (wikitech-l mailing list). ... the fourth in our series profiling participants in this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) programme.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Korea. Started in September 2006, WikiProject Korea covers the history and culture of the Korean people, including both countries that currently occupy the Korean peninsula. This task has proven difficult with North Koreans notably absent from the Wikipedia community due to tight control over access to external media. The project is home to over 16,000 pages, including 15 pieces of Featured material and 66 Good and A-class Articles.
The August 2012 Copy Edit of the Month Contest is currently in the submissions stage. Submit your best August copy edit there before the end of the month. Submissions end, and discussion and voting begin, on September 1 at 00:00 (UTC).
September 2012 Backlog elimination drive is a month-long effort to reduce the size of the copy edit backlog. The drive begins on September 1 at 00:00 (UTC) and ends on September 30 at 23:59 (UTC). Our goals are to copy edit the articles tagged longest ago and to complete all requests placed before the end of August. Barnstars will be awarded to anyone who copy edits at least one article, and special awards will be given to the top six in the following categories: "Number of articles", "Number of words", "Number of articles of over 5,000 words", "Number of articles tagged longest ago", and "Longest article". This drive features a much easier signup process. We hope to see you there! – Your drive coordinators: Stfg, Allens, and Torchiest.
Portal:NASCAR is a place where we can exhibit our best articles and most interesting free images. Any article which is FA, GA, High or Top importance can be added for display as a Selected article or as a Selected biography, free images can be added to be displayed as Selected pictures. All of these are chosen randomly for display on each page view to avoid both bias and having to manually update the page monthly. If you've created or seen an article or image that you feel would be a good addition to the portal, follow the instructions on the pages linked above. Please nominate articles or images on the talk pages.
Pole position driver Kasey Kahne maintained his lead into the first corner to begin the race, but Jimmie Johnson, who started in the second position on the grid, took the lead before the first lap was over. Afterward, Greg Biffle became the leader, and would eventually lead to the race high of 66 laps. Tony Stewart led after the final pit stops, ahead of Hamlin and Harvick. Harvick helped Hamlin to become the leader, but with twelve laps left, Harvick gained on Hamlin and claimed the first position with eleven lap remaining. Harvick maintained his position to claim his first Sprint Cup victory at Michigan International Speedway.
There were five cautions and nineteen lead changes among nine different drivers throughout the course of the race, Harvick's third win of the season. The result maintained the first position in the Drivers' Championship and clinched him a position in the Chase. He remained 293 points ahead of second place driver Jeff Gordon and 353 ahead of Denny Hamlin. Chevrolet maintained its lead in the Manufacturers' Championship, thirty points ahead of Toyota and sixty-one ahead of Ford, with thirteen races remaining in the season. A total of 105,000 people attended the race, while 4.917 million watched it on television.
(Read more...)
Wikimedia editors have been debating a community proposal for the adoption of a new project to host free travel-guide content. The debate reached a new stage when a three-month request for comment on Meta came to an end, with a decision to set up the first new type of Wikimedia project in half a decade. The original proposal for the travel guide unfolded during April on Meta and the Wikimedia-l mailing lists, centring around the wish of volunteer contributors to the WikiTravel project to work in a non-commercial environment.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, edited jointly with the Wikimedia Research Committee and republished as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Developers were left one step closer to an understanding of the code review outlook this week after the creation of a graph plotting "number changesets awaiting review" over time. The chart, which also shows the number of new changesets created on a daily basis, reveals a peak in the number of unreviewed changesets in mid-July, followed by a short drop. The current figure stands at approximately 219 unreviewed changesets.
This week the Signpost interviews Mark Arsten, who has written or contributed significantly to ten featured articles; most have related to new religious movements, and some have touched on other controversial or quirky topics. Mark gives us a rundown on how he keeps neutral and what drives him to write featured content; he also gives some hints for aspiring writers.
This week, we hopped in a little blue box with a batch of companions from WikiProject Doctor Who. Started in April 2005, the project has grown to include about 4,000 pages about the world's longest-running science fiction television show, its spinoffs, and various related material. The project is the parent of the Torchwood Taskforce and a child of WikiProject British TV and WikiProject Science Fiction. With new Doctor Who episodes airing this week and a 50th anniversary celebration around the corner, we thought now would be a good time to inquire about the famed Time Lord.
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