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The Signpost: 04 March 2013

Recently I was having a casual conversation with a friend, and he mentioned that he spent too many hours a day playing video games. I responded with a comment that I, too, spent way too much time on an activity of my own – Wikipedia. In an attempt to reply with a relevant remark, he offered something along the lines of: "So have you ever written anything?" After a second, I quickly answered yes, but I was still in shock over his question. It seemed to be rooted in a belief on his part that using Wikipedia meant just reading the articles, and that editing was something that someone, hypothetically, might do, but not really more likely than randomly counting to 7,744.
"WP:OUTING", the normally little-noticed policy corner of the English Wikipedia that governs the release of editors' personal information, has suddenly been brought to wider attention after long-term contributor and featured article writer Cla68 was indefinitely blocked last week. This snowballed into several other blocks, a desysopping by ArbCom, and a request for arbitration.
Three articles, six lists, and three pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week, including the article on "Laura Secord", who was a Canadian heroine of the War of 1812 best known for warning the British of an impending American attack.
This week, we tuned to WikiProject Television Stations, a project that dates back to March 2004. WikiProject Television Stations primarily focuses on local stations, national networks, television markets, and other topics related to television channels in North America, the Caribbean, and some Pacific countries. The project has a fair bit of work ahead of them with over 4,000 unassessed articles and only one Good Article out of 626 assessed articles, giving the project a relative WikiWork rating of 5.262.

Wikidata weekly summary #48

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

Please comment on Talk:Contemporary Christian music

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DYK for John Blackadder (soldier)

The DYK project (nominate) 00:02, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: February 2013



Headlines
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The Signpost: 11 March 2013

I am pleased to announce that the Signpost and Wikizine have reached an in-principle agreement that will see Wikizine published as a special Signpost section at the beginning of each month.
During March, three of the Wikimedia Foundation's grantmaking schemes on Meta will reach important crossroads, which will shape how both the editing communities and Wikimedia institutions handle the distribution of donors' money across the movement.
Twelve articles, five lists, and eight pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week, including an image of the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, a front-engine, 2-seat luxury grand tourer automobile developed by Mercedes-AMG.
There are three open cases, and a final decision has been given in the Doncram case.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court Cases.
The WMF has aborted a plan to deploy version 5 of the Article Feedback tool (AFTv5) rolled out to all English Wikipedia articles.

Geonotice

Hi Andrew, just a quick ping about the Geonotice request I posted for the Women in the Arts edit-a-thon a few days ago. Hoping it can be distributed soon. Cheers, Sarasays (talk) 14:04, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Many thanks! --Sarasays (talk) 15:39, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Harlem Shake (song)

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Wikidata weekly summary #49

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
    • Development
    • Design improvements to the SetClaim API module
    • More work on implementing the simple inclusion syntax that will be 1 way to access Wikidata data on Wikipedia
    • More work on Lua (the second way to access Wikidata data on Wikipedia)
    • Added parser page property to hold entity id in client. This fixes:
      • bugzilla:45037 - don’t show edit link if noexternallanglinks has suppressed all Wikidata links
      • bugzilla:44536 - have the edit link go directly to the Q### pages, instead of Special:ItemByTitle which shall make the link be more reliable and work for all namespaces
    • Selenium tests for deleted-property-handling
    • Selenium tests for multiline references
    • Selenium tests for add-sitelinks-from-client
    • Selenium tests for Entity-Selector-as-Searchbox
    • Selenium tests for language-table
    • Implemented in-process caching for entities
    • Lua support to access the repo data and implement getEntity (so you can use stuff like entity = mw.wikibase.getEntity("Q1459") in Lua modules)
    • rebuildTermSearchKey is now ready for production (this still needs to be run but once done it will make search case-insensitive)
    • Improved error reports from the API
    • Ground work for better edit summaries from the API
    • Added a table of content to item pages
    • Added debug functionality to be able to investigate why it takes longer than it should for Wikidata changes to show up on recent changes and watchlists on Wikipedia
    • Finished implementation of References-UI
    • Implemented GUID generator in JavaScript
    • Worked on fixing a bug related to deleted properties where the UI would display wrong information
    • Minor fixes/additions to the JS datamodel implementation
    • Minor bugfixes in Statements-UI
    • More work on RDF export
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Did you know?
    • If you add a Babel box to your user page Wikidata will show you items and descriptions in other languages you speak as well without you having to switch the language
    • Want to know which items use a certain property? Try the “what links here” link on a property page
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 18:33, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

And the next object is...

Hello, Andrew Gray. You have new messages at [[User talk:Tim riley (talk) 11:23, 16 March 2013 (UTC)|User talk:Tim riley (talk) 11:23, 16 March 2013 (UTC)]].
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Please comment on Talk:Northeastern United States

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Template:Did you know nominations/George Pirie Thomson

Andrew, I wasn't sure whether you wanted to take another look at this DYK nomination now that your earlier comments have been addressed. If not, please let me know. Thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 00:50, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Discussion at WikiProject Opera

I'm writing to members of WikiProject Opera who have been active on the talk page over the last year. We currently have a proposal to add infoboxes about individual operas to their articles. As this would involve a fairly major change from our current practice, and lead to a potentially lengthy transition, it would be helpful to hear the views from as many project members as possible. The discussion is at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Opera#Opera infoboxes. Best, Voceditenore (talk) 09:03, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Geonotice in LA

Hey, I need a geonotice adjusted - sorry! The geonotice for this event didn't have quite a wide enough area. Apparently it needed to be Los Angeles metropolitan area and not Los Angeles. Apologies - I just moved to LA and didn't quite realize that! If you could fix that, I would really appreciate it! Wadewitz (talk) 21:00, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Could you give me some coordinates for the area? I winged it last time based on an old session in LA, and for that I think I just guessed based on an arbitrary centre point!
The geonotice needs a box, so if you can give me two opposite corners of a square (NE and SW, or SE and NW) around the area you want - unfortunately, I don't know the LA area well enough to be sure of what the metropolitan area translates to in practice. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:05, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Ha! No one knows. Let's try this:
34 degrees 17 minutes N, 118 degrees 30 minutes W
33 degrees 41 minutes N, 117 degrees 47 minutes W
Let me know if I did that right! Wadewitz (talk) 21:21, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Interesting - the current geonotice is actually wider than that! [33, -117], [35, -119]. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:23, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Really, because I'm not getting it. That's why I wanted to adjust it. Wadewitz (talk) 21:32, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Strange! This map shows approximately what area it thinks it should cover. This service will return what we think your IP geolocates to - does it fall within 33-35 N and 117-199 W? It might be that you're showing up as outside the area for some reason.
If not that, then I'm baffled! Andrew Gray (talk) 21:37, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
According to that info, I should totally be getting the notice, but I'm not. My co-organizer is not getting the notice, either, and he is also within the area, but at a different IP. We are worried it isn't showing up at all. Wadewitz (talk) 21:41, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Very strange indeed. Is anything else showing up at the top of the watchlist, or just a blank? Andrew Gray (talk) 21:42, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
I'm getting a Wikipedia notice about a discussion to archive citations. That's it. Wadewitz (talk) 21:45, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
I am definitely baffled by this. Checking on IRC, we have one person in LA seeing it and one person not. Which isn't much help! One last possibility - try purging the script? It might help. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:47, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Ok, that worked. So, at least I know some people are getting it! Wadewitz (talk) 22:13, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Sounds like a weird caching problem somewhere. Sorry I can't be of more help! Andrew Gray (talk) 22:27, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Newcastle Library

Hi, I've discovered that the Newcastle Library has several images of Brazilian warships, including Minas Geraes (with a beautiful second image), Rio Grande do Sul, and Sultan Osman I (ex-Rio de Janeiro). I would like to use those four, along with any they have of Almirante Latorre (aka Canada), but they're marked as copyrighted. Even though I suspect they aren't, I figure it's better to establish a rapport than steal them ... but while I was typing a message through their contact page, I figured that you would be a much better bet. Do you have any contacts there, or at the least a better chance than me of getting these images? Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 10:43, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

P.S. There's also several other images I'd love to have (like [3], [4], and [5]), but the ones listed above are what I'd really want, and I don't want to ask too much of them. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 10:46, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
At the least, there are several other views of the first image I linked—hopefully Tyne has some! If it helps, any high-quality image of Rio (aka Sultan Osman, Agincourt), Almirante Latorre, or Rio Grande do Sul will immediately become the most important image on those pages, as the images we do have are of terrible quality. Thanks Andrew! Your help is much appreciated. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 19:13, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
Any luck so far? :-) Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 07:34, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Nomination of List of papabili in the 2013 papal conclave for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article List of papabili in the 2013 papal conclave is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of papabili in the 2013 papal conclave until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion template from the top of the article. -- --JamboQueen (talk) 08:47, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the good advice. It seems like a mess and I just first thought that people with much experience and who have seen similar situation could help with supportive editorial policy comments. --JamboQueen (talk) 09:44, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Please comment on Talk:Spinal manipulation

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The Signpost: 18 March 2013

Just two months into his second term as an arbitrator on the English Wikipedia, Coren resigned from the Committee with a blistering attack on his fellow arbitrators. At the heart of a strongly worded statement, posted both on his talk page and the arbitration notice board, was the claim that ArbCom has become politicised to the extent that "it can no longer do the job it was ostensibly elected for".
This week, we composed a tribute to WikiProject Composers. The project was created during the final hours of 2004 and finalized in early January 2005. It has grown to encompass over 8,000 pages, including 26 Featured Articles and 23 Good Articles. WikiProject Composers faces a difficult workload, with a relative WikiWork rating of 5.45.
Ask librarians what they think about Wikipedia and you might get some interesting answers. Some will throw up their hands about the laziness of the Google generation and their overdependence on Wikipedia. Some see it as the "competition". And some will tell you it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Nine articles, seven lists, eleven images, and one topic were promoted to "featured status" this week on the English Wikipedia.
On Thursday, arbitrator Coren resigned, following closely on the heels of Hersfold's resignation on Wednesday. There are two open cases. A final decision has been given in the Richard case.
The WMF's engineering report for January was published this week, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month.

Wikidata weekly summary #50

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Rolled out new code on wikidata.org. The new stuff you probably care about is:
      • Improved references. They can now have multiple lines. This should make references much more useful. You can now have one reference with for example values for each of the properties "book", "author", "page" to describe one source.
      • Fixed the prev/next links in diff view (bugzilla:45821)
      • d:Special:EntitiesWithoutLabel now lets you filter by language and entity type
    • Widget to add language links on the Wikipedias directly: added setting to enable/disable it per wiki and made it available for logged-in users only
    • Widget to add language links on the Wikipedias directly: improved layout / size
    • Made it so that the “edit links” link on Wikipedia is also shown when the corresponding item only has a link to this one language and no other languages
    • Submitted improved Apache config patch to make wikidata.org always redirect to www.wikidata.org, which is awaiting code review and deployment.
    • Improved the script that is responsible for taking Wikidata changes to the Wikipedias
    • Added a few ways to better debug the script responsible for taking Wikidata changes to the Wikipedias. This should help with investigating why some changes take way to long to show up on the Wikipedias.
    • Started work on automatically adding edited items to the user’s watchlist (according to preferences)
    • Finished script for rebuilding search keys, so we can finally get case insensitive matches in a lot of places
    • Support for multi-line references in diff view
    • Selenium tests for inclusion syntax
    • Improved parser function (that will be used to access Wikidata data on the Wikipedias) to accept property ID or label
    • Increased isolation of data model component to increase clarity and visibility of bad dependencies
    • Worked on schema access in the SQLStore (of the query component)
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • 3rd Media Web Symposium 2013
    • Wikidata trifft Archäologie
    • SMWCon Spring NYC
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Did you know?
    • When you edit a statement there is a little wheel in front of the text field. This lets you choose between “custom value”, “unknown value” and “no value”. “No value” means that we know that the given property has no value, e.g. Elizabeth I of England had no spouse. “Unknown value” means that the property has a value, but it is unknown which one -- e.g. Pope Linus most certainly had a year of birth, but it is unknown to us.
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 00:18, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Harvard Edit-a-thon Geonotice Poke

Hey there - Just wanted to see if you might be able to process the geonotice request for my event, Wikipedia:Geonotice#Wikipedia:Meetup.2FWomens History Edit-a-thon - Harvard, sometime today. The event takes place in one week, so I'd love to get the word out there ASAP. Thanks in advance! Girona7 (talk) 14:49, 22 March 2013 (UTC) 

  Thanks very much! Girona7 (talk) 16:09, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Help desk

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Please comment on Talk:Trevor Lock

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The Signpost: 25 March 2013

Our travels have brought us to Pittsburgh, the American city known for steelworks and bridges.
Seven articles, one list, six pictures, and one topic were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.
This case, brought by Mark Arsten, was opened over a dispute over transgenderism topics that began off-wiki. The evidence phase was scheduled to close March 7, 2013, with a proposed decision due to be posted by March 29.
Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation since December 2007, has announced her plans to leave the position when a successor is recruited. Ranked as one of the most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine, Sue Gardner is widely associated with the rise of the Wikimedia movement as a major custodian of human knowledge and cultural products.
Since its inception in May 2011, the Foundation's Visual Editor project has grown to become one of its main focuses. As the project nears its two-year birthday, the Signpost caught up with Visual Editor project manager James Forrester to discuss the progress on the project.
A paper presented at last month's CSCW Conference observes that "Mass collaboration systems are often characterized as unstructured organizations lacking rule and order", yet Wikipedia has a well developed body of policies to support it as an organization.

Wikidata weekly summary #51

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • The first 11 Wikipedias can now include data from Wikidata in their articles (If you want to see it in action see the infobox at it:Torino)
    • Worked on automatic summaries for statements
    • Worked on making properties accessible from the client using their label so you can use {{#property:executive director}} instead of {{#property:p169}} for example
    • Made qualifiers ready for the next deployment (Please test. See details further down.)
    • Selenium tests for qualifiers
    • Fixed some issues related to QUnit testing
    • Worked on improved handling and code design of multiple snak lists in the UI (qualifiers, references)
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • Newline 2013
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • We’re currently carefully monitoring performance after the deployment of phase 2 on the first 11 Wikipedias. There seem to be a few small issues. As soon as they are resolved we'll deploy on English Wikipedia. All other Wikipedias are planned to follow very soon after that.
    • Bye and a big thank you to Anja, Silke, Jens and John who are leaving the development team at the end of the month and will work on other cool things. You’ll be missed!
    • Ever had any doubt about the possibilities of Wikidata? Talk to Wiri!
    • We worked on reducing the time it takes for Wikidata edits to show up in the Wikipedias and made some progress. Daniel posted an analysis
    • We started running a script on the database in order to make search on Wikidata case-insensitive. This should be finished in a few days and then search should be more useful.
    • In addition to the above we have rolled out a new search box that suggests items. This should also make finding things on Wikidata a lot easier for you.
    • We’re making some progress with Internet Explorer 8 support but there are a lot of issues with it (some outside our control). It’s unclear at the moment how much we can improve it still without spending an unjustified amount of time on it. You can follow the progress at bugzilla:44228
    • Edits are now auto-confirmed for users with more than 50 edits and account age 4 days: bugzilla:46461
    • Do you need old-style interwiki links for a sister project for example? This is for you
    • The Wikimedia Foundation applied as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code again. We have proposed some Wikidata projects for students to take up if the Foundation is accepted again. At least 2 other organisations that applied also propose Wikidata ideas. More details on that once we know which organisations are accepted.
    • Denny hacked together a tree of life based on data from Wikidata
    • Wikidata was added to wikipulse
    • A template to retrieve data from Wikidata if no local value is set
  • Did you know?
  • Open Tasks for You
    • See note at the end of this weekly summary
    • Help test qualifiers (m:Wikidata/Notes/Data model primer#Qualifiers - see also example statements there) on the test wiki so we can roll it out with the next release
    • Did you file a bug report for Wikidata or did someone else do it for you? Please take a minute to check if it is still valid. (Thanks for filing it btw!)
    • Add some missing descriptions to those items with the same label?
    • Hack on one of these

Could I have 2 mins of your time? As I’ll be working on some other projects for Wikimedia Germany as well from now on the time I can spend on Wikidata will be reduced. This means I’ll have to figure out what is useful to spend time on. If you’re reading this could you let me know for example on this discussion page? Also if you have ideas how to improve the weekly summaries please post them. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk)

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 20:34, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Ashton event

Looks just right to me. Perhaps mention it's a bring-a-laptop party? And conceivably "or" rather than "and" in the list of contacts? Would it help if I sketched out an informal template for ballet articles - history, characters, plot etc? Tim riley (talk) 22:59, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

A good question from the first to sign up, Andy Mabbett, viz "Are WMUK covering travel?" Tim riley (talk) 21:54, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Religion

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WikiCup 2013 March newsletter

We are halfway through round two. Pool A sees the strongest competition, with five out of eight of its competitors scoring over 100, and Pool H is lagging, with half of its competitors yet to score. WikiCup veterans lead overall; Pool A's Colorado Sturmvogel_66 (submissions) (2010's winner) leads overall, with poolmate London Miyagawa (submissions) (a finalist in 2011 and 2012) not far behind. Pool F's New South Wales Casliber (submissions) (a finalist in 2010, 2011 and 2012) is in third. The top two scorers in each pool, as well as the next highest 16 scorers overall, will progress to round three at the end of April.

Today has seen a number of Easter-themed did you knows from WikiCup participants, and March has seen collaboration from contestants with WikiWomen's History Month. It's great to see the WikiCup being used as a locus of collaboration; if you know of any collaborative efforts going on, or want to start anything up, please feel free to use the WikiCup talk page to help find interested editors. As well as fostering collaboration, we're also seeing the Cup encouraging the improvement of high-importance articles through the bonus point system. Highlights from the last month include GAs on physicist Niels Bohr (Australia Hawkeye7 (submissions)), on the European hare (Wales Cwmhiraeth (submissions)), on the constellation Circinus (Alaska Keilana (submissions) and New South Wales Casliber (submissions)) and on the Third Epistle of John (Indiana Cerebellum (submissions)). All of these subjects were covered on at least 50 Wikipedias at the beginning of the year and, subsequently, each contribution was awarded at least three times as many points as normal.

Wikipedians who enjoy friendly competition may be interested in participating in April's wikification drive. While wikifying an article is typically not considered "significant work" such that it can be claimed for WikiCup points, such gnomish work is often invaluable in keeping articles in shape, and is typically very helpful for new writers who may not be familiar with formatting norms.

A quick reminder: now, submission pages will need only a link to the article and a link to the nomination page, or, in the case of good article reviews, a link to the review only. See your submissions' page for details. This will hopefully make updating submission pages a little less tedious. If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews. Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. J Milburn (talk • email) and The ed17 (talk • email) J Milburn (talk) 22:16, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

First Glasgow Wiki Meetup

You are invited to the first ever Glasgow Wiki Meetup which will take place at The Sir John Moore, 260-292 Argyle Street, City of Glasgow G2 8QW on Sunday 12 May 2013 from 1.00 pm. If you have never been to one, this is an opportunity to meet other Wikipedians in an informal atmosphere for Wiki and non-Wiki related chat and for beer or food if you like. Experienced and new contributors are all welcome. This event is definitely not restricted just to discussion of Scottish topics. Bring your laptop if you like and use the free Wifi or just bring yourself. Even better, bring a friend! Click the link for full details. Looking forward to seeing you. Philafrenzy (talk) 10:17, 1 April 2013 (UTC) + Brighton Andrew, not on the same day!

Please comment on User:WereSpielChequers/Integration of Wikimedia projects into the Galactic Encyclopaedia

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Hand with Doom (bar)

Hi Andrew. I'm trying to get Doom Bar up to featured status and I no longer have access to one of the sources, which I need to update a page reference. HJ Mitchell suggested that you might be able to help me out. Do you think you might be able to find me a copy of this? If that's not enough info, let me know what you'd need. Cheers WormTT(talk) 12:51, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

No online access (not unless I pay, anyway). I've tried to order a copy of the issue from storage - this didn't work properly last time I tried something for HJ, but I'm 90% confident I should be able to get you a photocopy at least :-) Andrew Gray (talk) 13:00, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
Photocopy or a scan would be great. Let me know how you get on, and thanks so much for your help. WormTT(talk) 13:18, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 01 April 2013

The Wikimedia Foundation has released its latest report card for the movement's hundreds of sites. The WMF has published statistics about the sites since 2009, but only recently have these been expanded in scope and depth to provide a rich source of data for investigating the movement and the world it serves. Dutch-born Erik Zachte is the driver of the WMF's statistical output, and he writes that the report card and accompanying traffic statistics comprise "enough tables, bar charts and plots to keep you busy for a while".
This week's Report is dedicated to answering our readers' questions about WikiProjects. The following Frequently Asked Questions came from feedback at the WikiProject Report's talk page, the WikiProject Council's talk page, and from previous lists of FAQs.
The Signpost interviewed prolific featured content creator and former Signpost "featured content" report writer Crisco 1492 about ? and Indonesian cinema. ? was the "Today's featured article" for 1 April 2013. 1 April is popularly known as April Fools' Day in many countries.
The first round of individual engagement grants (IEGs) have been awarded, disbursing about $55.6k (€42.7k) to seven applicants.
A case brought by Lecen involves several articles about former Argentinian president Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877).
Users of ten Wikipedias got access to phase 2 of Wikidata following its first rollout to production wikis.

Wikidata weekly summary #52

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • The first year is over. Thank you everyone for being amazing and helping to build Wikidata and making it more than we could possibly have hoped for already. <3
    • Put a lot of work into improved support for Internet Explorer 8
    • Worked on improving recent changes code in client
    • Finished valueview refactoring. Created new extension “ValueView”
    • Implemented string formatter
  • Discussions/Press
  • Events
    • upcoming: GLAM-Wiki 2013
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Deployment of phase 2 on English Wikipedia is currently planned for April 8. The remaining Wikipedias are scheduled for April 10. As usual this might change if we run into problems along the way.
    • There is now a page showing the current lag for changes propagating to the Wikipedias so they can show up in watchlists and recent changes for example. This should ideally be in the range of a few minutes. Right now it is higher because of some abnormally high bot activity but decreasing. Should be down to a few minutes soon.
    • There’s now a badge you can add to Wikipedia articles to indicate there is data about it on Wikidata
    • We hit Q10000000
    • A Wikidata item in the wild ;-)
  • Did you know?
  • Open Tasks for You

Based on feedback for last week’s call for comments we will continue this newsletter. However more community help will be needed. From now on they’ll be drafted at d:Wikidata:Status updates/Next and your help is very welcome.

Please comment on MediaWiki talk:Bad image list

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This Month in GLAM: March 2013



Headlines
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Please comment on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mining

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Wikidata weekly summary #53

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Got some external professional review of our code and architecture and started working on their feedback
    • Worked on reducing the dispatch lag (the time it takes for changes on Wikidata to be sent to the Wikipedias for display in watchlist, recent changes and to purge affected pages)
    • Worked on using Redis for job queue to improve the lag situation even further
    • Created new Wikibase Query extension for phase 3 functionality
    • Autocomments & Autosummaries for SetClaim module
    • Worked on the GeoCoordinate parser
  • Events/Press
    • right now: GLAM-WIKI 2013
  • Discussions
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Deployment of phase 2 on the remaining Wikipedias was delayed because of a high lag of changes being propagated to the Wikipedias. The lag has been reduced considerably now and is going down even more. The new date for deployment will not be next week because there are other large changes on Wikimedia infrastructure scheduled that we do not want to interfere with. It will hopefully happen very soon after that though.
    • Next code update on wikidata.org is planned for Wednesday. This should include qualifiers and bugfixes.
    • There will probably be a short outage/read-only for wikidata.org on Tuesday (database is being switched to MariaDB)
    • If you're a student and interested in coding on Wikidata consider applying for Google Summer of Code.
    • There is a new user right: property creators
    • There is now a page to request deletion of a property
    • We now have Bureaucrats
    • Reasonator was improved and extended (1 2)
  • Open Tasks for You

Based on feedback for last week’s call for comments we will continue this newsletter. However more community help will be needed. From now on they’ll be drafted at d:Wikidata:Status updates/Next and your help is very welcome.

Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 23:24, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

DYK for 824th Tank Destroyer Battalion

The DYK project (nominate) 08:02, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

mail

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Hello Andrew, in fact the source is always right at the start, eg R v Lovelass and Others (1834) 172 ER 1380 - that case citation refers to a law report (ER stands for English Reports). Wherever possible I try to link it to one on the free online database at bailii.org, or in the case of Berezovsky v Abramovich [2012] EWHC 2463 (Comm) I've linked to a judiciary.gov.uk file. (I add in the references sections because in advance in the hope I, or someone else, will fill in more later - it is a shame they lie empty!) For the case report citations, I was hoping that we could make a template like they use for American cases - because the case citation method isn't always clear - what they've got is this: Brazee v. Michigan, 241 U.S. 340 (1916). If you know how to do that, or know anyone else, it'd be super. Best, Wikidea 06:22, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 08 April 2013

Numerous Wikimedia Commons editors have chimed in on the Wikimedia Foundation's deployment of a new feature to its mobile website. Allowing anonymous users to register and upload pictures for use in an article, the feature was placed prominently at the top of Wikipedia articles in multiple languages.
This week, we felt the world tremble in the presence of WikiProject Earthquakes. The project was started in May 2008 to deal with articles about earthquakes, aftershocks, seismology, seismologists, plate tectonics, and related articles. While the project has seen success building 14 Featured Articles, one A-class Article, and 21 Good Articles, a fairly heavy workload remains, with a relative WikiWork rating of 4.94. WikiProject Earthquakes maintains a portal, a list of open tasks, a popular pages listing, and an article alerts watchlist.
Last Friday, the Wikimedia movement awoke to news that one of their number—Rémi Mathis, a French volunteer editor—had been summoned to the offices of the interior intelligence service DCRI and threatened with criminal charges and fines if he did not delete an article on the French Wikipedia about a radio station used by the French military.
The arbitration committee is looking for expertise in Argentina and the Spanish language for a case involving former Argentinean president Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877).
Four articles and two pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.
The deployment of phase 2 of Wikidata to the English Wikipedia, originally scheduled for 8 April but delayed due to technical problems, may be rescheduled again as the result of community resistance.

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Delaware v City of Westminster, you added links pointing to the disambiguation pages Freehold and Westminster Council (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

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Release of an image

Hi Andrew. Can you please enquire whether we could place this image in CC-BY-SA. Many thanks, Robin -- Llywelyn2000 (talk) 14:52, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Should be practical - I'll see what I can do. --Andrew Gray (talk) 15:42, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Great talk

GLAM-WIKI in Real Life Barnstar
Great work on GLAM-WIKI.
—Tom Morris (talk) 15:02, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Merge proposals

Hi there
You lodged a couple of merge proposals a while ago, on 9th (East Norfolk) Regiment of Foot and 10th (North Lincoln) Regiment of Foot articles. There's been little or no objection to these proposals, and (as you say) the same format is used in other, similar, articles, so I would suggest (if you still wish) to go ahead with it. Moonraker12 (talk) 17:55, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Geonotice Proposal (Elevated urgency)

Sorry to barge on your talkpage here when there is clearly a geonotice request page; However, we are trying to organize a Contribution month event here in London, Ontario, Canada, in a matter of ten days. The library has already allocated physical resources and technologists to service the event: If we could please get a notice that directs the user in London, Ontario, Canada, to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Contribution_Month_in_Canada#London.2C_Ontario , this would be fantastic; I'm not sure what political or technical barriers there are to this, however. Please respond whenever it is convenient - you are after all, extremely busy! But thank you for taking the time to read this request, and again, sorry for the talk page stalking.

All the best. Cheers! -T.I.M(Contact) 03:54, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia talk:Child protection

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Geonotice

Hi Andrew. I was hoping to get a geonotice up for the DC area. As it's for an editathon this Saturday, I would be grateful if you could add it as soon as you get a chance. I would like to use the following text:

On Saturday, April 20, Wikimedia DC is partnering with the George Washington University to host the "All Things GW" Edit-a-Thon at the Teamsters Labor History Research Center. Please join us for behind-the-scenes tours of the University Archives and help edit articles about GWU and DC history. Please RSVP today!

Can you help us out with this? Thanks! Dominic·t 13:47, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Done. Andrew Gray (talk) 18:40, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Your input is requested

Greetings, Andrew Gray! If we have not met, I'm AutomaticStrikeout. I've come here to ask you to take part in the survey at User:AutomaticStrikeout/Are admins interested in a RfB?. I am trying to gauge the general level of interest that administrators have in running for cratship, as well as pinpoint the factors that affect that interest level. Your input will be appreciated. Happy editing, AutomaticStrikeout (T • C • Sign AAPT) 02:07, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 15 April 2013

The RfA process is widely discussed here on the English Wikipedia and it has been well documented that less and less new Requests for adminship are being filed. There are an abundance of bytes devoted to the discussion and analysis of this situation and plenty of hands have been wrung over the matter. Various RfCs have attempted to find a way to fix the problem. Many proposals have been made offering solutions, some more potentially drastic than others, with the goal of making the changes necessary to kick–start RfA back into regular action. However, Wikipedia operates based on consensus and, to this point, there are have simply been too many disagreeing views for us to reach a consensus on how to increase RfA activity.
This week, we ventured to WikiProject South Africa. The project was started in February 2005 and is home to thirteen pieces of featured material, two A-class articles, and twenty-one good articles.
The most recent move to reform the requests for adminship process on the English Wikipedia has failed, after a complex and drawn-out three-step procedure for community input was subject to decreasing participation as time wore on and came up with no clear consensus.
Four articles, twelve lists, and seven pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.

Please comment on Template talk:Ghost in the Shell

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Wikidata weekly summary #54

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Dispatch lag is now down to 0 so changes should show up very quickly on the Wikipedias in watchlists and recent changes
    • wikidata.org now always redirects to www.wikidata.org. This should among other things solve the issue where people were not able to edit when on wikidata.org (bugzilla:45005)
    • Fixed weird blocked-user/protected-page handling in UI (bugzilla:45140)
    • Final meetings for the external professional review of our code and architecture. They were quite happy with the quality of the codebase and gave useful tips for improvements
    • Worked on automatic summaries for editing claims
    • Investigation of different JavaScript frameworks dealing with date and time
    • Worked on using Redis and the job queue for change notifications to clients
    • Work on the storage code for answering queries
  • Events/Press
    • GLAM-WIKI 2013
    • upcoming: office hour on IRC about sources
    • upcoming: Opensource Treffen
    • upcoming: intro to Wikidata at the British Library
  • Discussions
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
  • Open Tasks for You
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 22:49, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Please comment on Template talk:Inactive WikiProject banner

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ODNB search quirks

We were talking about this. I was asked to comment on Talk:Æthelgeard, and trying the ODNB search for him gets Æthelgeard. Charles Matthews (talk) 07:54, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

The Signpost: 22 April 2013

An article by John Sweeney published on 22 April 2013 on scnow.com, the website of the Florence, South Carolina Morning News, reported that Florence city officials have taken to monitoring and correcting the Wikipedia article on their city.
This week, we spent some time with a project that develops tools and methods for improving the user experience in the hope that new users will continue editing the encyclopedia. The project was started in July 2012 and has grown to include 124 members. The project's members partner with the Teahouse and the Welcoming Committee to spread WikiLove, welcome new users, encourage civility, and other related activities.
The Wikimedia Conference is an annual meeting of the chapters to discuss their status and the organisational development of the Wikimedia movement. For the first time it included groups that wish to be considered for WMF affiliation as thematic organisations and one of the three groups that was recently affiliated as a user group. The conference was also attended by members of the Wikimedia Foundation's (WMF) Board of Trustees, the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC), the WMF Affiliations Committee, and a representative of the Wikivoyage Association.
Nine articles, four lists, eight pictures, and one topic were promoted to "featured" status this week on the English Wikipedia.
The Sexology case is nearing completion after arbitrators were unable to agree on a topic ban for one of the participants.
On Monday, the English Wikipedia became the 12th wiki to be able to pull data from the central Wikidata.org repository, with other wikis scheduled to receive the update on Wednesday.

Please comment on Talk:Campaign finance

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Module:Authority control

Hi! I believe that the Module:Authority control is ready for production use. Do you agree with this? If yes, can you replace the content of the model by the sanboxed version and remove unneeded sub-templates, please? Thanks! Tpt (talk) 16:49, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Chadwick's neutron detector

I wwonder if you can help me. I'm looking for a photograph of Chadwick's neutron detector for en:James Chadwick from the Science Museum in London. Hawkeye7 (talk) 20:09, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #55

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Global message delivery 21:49, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

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The Signpost: 29 April 2013

The Funds Dissemination Committee released its recommendations to the WMF board last Sunday. The news that the Hong Kong chapter's application for US$212K had failed was followed by a strongly worded resignation announcement by Deryck Chan on the public Wikimedia-l mailing-list.
On 24 April 2013, novelist Amanda Filipacchi published what turned out to be an influential op-ed in the New York Times; illuminating the unusual background of the Yuri Gadyukin hoax.
Nine articles, three lists, three pictures, and one topic were promoted to "featured" this week.
This week, we traveled to the Japanese Wikipedia's WikiProject Baseball for perspectives from a version of Wikipedia that treats WikiProjects as their own unique namespace (プロジェクト:) independent of "Wikipedia:".
The WP:TOP25 and WP:5000 reports chronicle the most popular Wikipedia articles on a weekly basis.
The Sexology case closed shortly after publication with no changes.
A report on an online service which was created to conduct real-time monitoring of Wikipedia articles of companies, and more.
This week saw the deployment of the Echo extension, also known as "notifications".

Wikidata weekly summary #56

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
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