Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 9,599 last month to 9,683 on February 28th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 74 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 67. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 55 out of a total number of 2,917 articles.
Currently we have twenty nine Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
New software release
By the time you read this the new software release mentioned in the last newsletter should be in as it is currently scheduled for 2 March. Problems in switching other wikis have been encountered, most notably Commons, which was reverted twice and, at the time of writing, is still experiencing problems with the new software. See article in Signpost for details.
Discussions
Members may be interested in some discussions that are ongoing at the moment. A discussion on whether or not secondary schools meet notability guidelines is still on-going. If you are interested in having articles on secondary schools then raise your voice in the discussion. Another schools related one is taking place on the talk page of template {{Infobox UK school}} about introducing co-ordinates in to the infobox in addition to the top right corner of the article. Similar discussion was also raised at {{Infobox UK place}}. If you have views then chip in and see if consensus can be found on these areas.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The March 2012 articles selected below are an editors choice as there were no suggestions on the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Delivered March 2012 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 08:41, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
Within the project, discussions included how two project articles appeared on TFA in quick succession and an RfC on inclusion of particular viewpoint on future lengthening of certain trainsets on British Rail Class 458
Within other related projects, a relevant discussion included was on canal bridges
Requests
If you want to post a request for help with an article, finding a photograph or seeking reference material, contact the editor
Hello DisillusionedBitterAndKnackered. I am currently conducting a study on the dispute resolution processes on the English Wikipedia, in the hope that the results will help improve these processes in the future. Whether you have used dispute resolution a little or a lot, now we need to know about your experience. The survey takes around five minutes, and the information you provide will not be shared with third parties other than to assist in analyzing the results of the survey. No personally identifiable information will be released.
Please click HERE to participate.
Many thanks in advance for your comments and thoughts.
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 9,683 last month to 9,730 on March 29th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 73 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 68. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 55 out of a total number of 2,928 articles.
Currently we have thirty Yorkshire featured articles:
As of 29 March 2012, we have assessed 100% of all articles with a project banner.
(Some new and additional article talk pages may still require a banner however)
Thanks
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
Link rot
This month I thought that we should focus on link rot in articles. Articles are created with lots of references to online sources as this is often easier than using printed sources. This is all well and good until a few months down the line when the web site is no longer available or has been re-organised and the page linked to has been moved. Whatever the reason for the change results in the reference link in our article becoming dead or just pointing at the main page of the site in question. The link therefore provides no verification for the information in our article and needs to be repaired. If you find a link like this then it should be tagged with the {{dead link}} template rather than deleted as the information may give someone a clue as to where to find a replacement link. If you know where the page has been moved to then go ahead and change the URL in the reference rather than tagging it. You could Google to see if a new page can be located or use the Wayback machine to see if there is an archived copy of the page available. If an archived version is located then use the |archiveurl= and |archivedate= fields of the {{citation}} template to record the archived version of the page.
The more information that is recorded when the reference is added the easier it is to find replacement URLs so remember to record as much information as possible when adding a reference. A bare URL with no information as to page title, publisher, publication date etc. makes finding replacements almost impossible. You can add archive details when adding a reference so that there is a backup copy already recorded for the reference. A BOT is currently operating to add archive details to live links to prevent future link rot. For more information on the subject of link rot see here.
It would be good, if this month, we try to reduce the number of {{dead link}} templates in the project's articles as a BOT is currently going round adding the template to articles.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The April 2012 articles selected below are an editors choice as there were no suggestions on the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Delivered April 2012 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 05:08, 13 April 2012 (UTC)
Emergency gas works cause temporary diversion of route 50
From Tuesday 8 May some long term, but temporary, changes will be made to local traffic arrangements in the North Woolwich area to enable Crossrail works to take place, some lasting 18 months
April
TfL's High Court injunction prevents Addison Lee from instructing its drivers to use bus lanes
Shortlisted bidders for the Bank Station Capacity Upgrade project announced
Londoners urged to plan ahead for Games-time travel as full and final Tube and rail 'hotspot' data released
Private hire vehicle drivers could be liable to personal criminal prosecution if they break traffic regulations, including by driving in bus lanes
New strengthening cables installed within Hammersmith Flyover
New entrance to West Croydon station provides better access for all
All the world's poets on the Tube
Major resurfacing works to take place along Victoria Embankment across Easter Bank Holiday weekend
Temporary changes to bus services during London 2012 Games test event in Woolwich.
Capital's rogue limousines targeted
Out-of-hours deliveries to be encouraged during London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games
MUMS-to-be travelling by Tube can get a baby on board badge so passengers know they may need to sit down
Within the project, discussions included how two project articles appeared on TFA in quick succession, a RfC on inclusion of particular viewpoint on future lengthening of certain trainsets on British Rail Class 458 and assessment of London Underground's electric locomotives
Within other related projects, a relevant discussion included was on canal bridges and speeds of trains and rail routes
Requests
If you want to post a request for help with an article, finding a photograph or seeking reference material, contact the editor
Thank you for not living your user name, but talking to articles, talking to users in a helpful way (Kathleen Ferrier), getting new users started, talking to self, - all with disillusioned (= good) sense, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:48, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
I like "debitterment", matching Gott fähret auf mit Jauchzen nicely. Will look for a better translation of the title, should match Christmas Oratorio in spirit. But of course there is Passion also, called "he was despised" on my user, and I used the line not only for Jesus, if you want to follow, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:01, 12 May 2012 (UTC)
Hi! Thank you for calling me on my edit. I was unaware of the usage you point out for such rationale comments in artcles themself (not surprising; there's so much to learn). *sigh....*
Please feel free to correctly reapply your comment. A bot I'm rabidly following around spotted your signature as something to be reverted. Sorry for removing your comment as well; I absolutely didn't mean to do a rude edit. Wishing you all the best and sorry for causing you this inconvenience. Fylbecatuloustalk12:35, 13 May 2012 (UTC).
Likewise, thank you for being the editor I encountered, instead of one who bites a newbie. I too am quite allergic to rudeness and all the dissention here. You kindly pointed out something I needed to know and more than likely saved me from later having my feelings hurt in a similar situation. Happy to meet you. Fylbecatuloustalk13:15, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 9,730 last month to 9,769 on April 28th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 73 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 68. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 56 out of a total number of 2,983 articles.
Currently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
Elections
May is the month for local elections to take place in many of our town and cities. This will create a lot of work in updating all of the place articles that include council make-up details. In addition each of the elections will require a new article creating to cover details of the election and the results in each of the wards. A number of elections from the last round of elections have not yet been created and it would be good if the missing election articles could be created so that we have a full set of recent elections for Yorkshire.
At the same time as the local council elections a number of cities in the area are holding a referendum on elected mayors. The main article will need to be updated with the results from each of the cities involved and any background that may be relevant to that article. Individual articles covering the referendum in each of the cities involved would also be useful to create while the details and references are to hand in the local press.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The May 2012 articles selected below are an editors choice as there were no suggestions on the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Delivered May 2012 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 23:30, 20 May 2012 (UTC)
First stations named for London Underground WiFi launch
May
Transport for London welcomes RMT acceptance of Olympics recognition proposals
Crime on London's transport network at eight year low
London 2012 Games first: TfL officials to provide live travel advice to businesses on Twitter
London Underground showcases proposals to boost Bank's capacity
TfL launches London 2012 Games 'Temporary Road Changes' planning tool and urges road users to plan ahead
Daily weekday River Bus services to treble between Putney and Blackfriars
Staff recognised at Dial-a-Ride Awards 2012
Medically trained BTP officers deployed on the Tube
New Oyster online accounts help customers keep track of their travel
Olympic legends compete to be the fastest to cross London
Tracey Emin unveils personal version of the Tube Map
Wembley Central becomes the 65th step-free Tube station
Vital investment and reliability programme result in record year of Tube performance
Emirates Air Line flying high as all 34 cabins undergo rigorous safety testing
Hammersmith Flyover to fully reopen to traffic on 30 May
TfL issues travel advice to enable London to celebrate The Queen's Diamond Jubilee
Buses diversions in Bromley town centre for Diamond Jubilee celebrations
Transport for London (TfL) and Network Rail are encouraging those travelling during Games-time to make short journeys on foot as Living Streets' Walk to Work Week launches
Who is Community? - a new artwork by Bob and Roberta Smith and Tim Newton running from 15 May 2012 through 2013 on display at Stratford station
Transport for London (TfL), the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) and Cubic Transportation Systems have picked up top honours at the 2012 International Transport Forum for their joint work on introducing Oyster onto the National Rail network in London
Emergency gas works cause temporary diversion of route 50
From Tuesday 8 May some long term, but temporary, changes will be made to local traffic arrangements in the North Woolwich area to enable Crossrail works to take place, some lasting 18 months
Within the project, discussions included how two project articles appeared on TFA in quick succession, a RfC on inclusion of particular viewpoint on future lengthening of certain trainsets on British Rail Class 458 and assessment of London Underground's electric locomotives
Within other related projects, relevant discussions included were on the expansion and promotion of Herne Hill railway station, the existence of the Sutton Loop, Midland Main Line vs Gret Central Main Line and WikiProject London in Signpost
Requests
If you want to post a request for help with an article, finding a photograph or seeking reference material, contact the editor
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 9,769 last month to 9,824 on May 28th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 74 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 70. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 56 out of a total number of 2,993 articles.
Currently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
Commons links
This month I thought that I would mention the {{Commons category}} template to generate a link to image categories on Commons holding additional images for topics. The template should be added to articles where Commons holds a number of other images that are not displayed in the article to provide a convenient link to these additional images. If you do not want to display the box then {{Commons category inline}} can be used instead to add an entry to the External links section.
The problem with both these templates is they use the article name as the name for the category on Commons so if an article is renamed the link is broken. To overcome this please ensure that all usages of these templates have as the first parameter the name of the category on Commons that is being used, even if it is the same as the article title. To enable those usages that have not been given a parameter to be tracked the hidden category Category:Commons category template with no category set has been set up. This has initially only been applied to the {{Commons category}} template. It would be good if members fixed these while editing articles to avoid having to edit specifically to fix the problem.
For newer members you can see hidden categories by setting the "Show hidden categories" option in the "Advanced options" section of the "Appearance" tab of the "my preferences" link.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The June 2012 articles selected below are an editors choice and a suggestion from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Delivered June 2012 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 12:27, 3 June 2012 (UTC)
Just in case you didn't see it – someone else has posted since me – I have shown my support in The history:
(cur | prev) 08:36, July 3, 2012 Gareth Griffith-Jones (talk | contribs) . . (41,542 bytes) (+4) . . (Re- previous edit summary: I agree with DisillusionedBitterAndKnackered ... of course it is "orbital" and should be referred to as such here. "Ring road", really! +para break added to clarify meaning of "It") (undo)
Within the project, discussions included how two project articles appeared on TFA in quick succession, a RfC on inclusion of particular viewpoint on future lengthening of certain trainsets on British Rail Class 458,assessment of London Underground's electric locomotives and the Hammersmith & City line navbox
Within other related projects, relevant discussions included were on major railway stations in Britain, a new London train wiki and the notability of railway magazines
Requests
If you want to post a request for help with an article, finding a photograph or seeking reference material, contact the editor
Wikipedia has a long history of collaborating with educational institutions. The Schools and universities program — international and in many languages, but dominated by US institutions — started in 2003 and evolved case by case with little system. However, that changed in 2009 as Wikimedia embarked on its formal strategic process, and outreach in higher education came to be seen in terms of achieving explicit goals — especially that of increasing editor participation.
The Russian Wikipedia has been blacked out for 24 hours, ending 20:00 UTC Tuesday, as a protest against Russian State Duma Bill 89417-6, a bill currently before the Duma (the Russian parliament). Visitors to the Russian Wikipedia are confronted by the sign above in protest at a draconian internet censorship bill before the Duma. The Russian word for Wikipedia is crossed out in this banner, and the text says: "Imagine a world without free knowledge. The State Duma is currently conducting the second reading of a bill to amend the "Law on Information", which has the potential to lead to the creation of extra-judicial censorship of the Internet in Russia, including the closure of access to the Russian Wikipedia. Today, the Wikipedia community protests against censorship as a threat to free knowledge that is open to all mankind. We ask that you oppose this bill."
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Football, which focuses on the sport also known as association football or soccer. WikiProject Football is by far the largest sport project and one of the most active projects on Wikipedia in terms of the number of articles covered, edits to articles, and talk page watchers.
Eight featured articles were promoted this week: ... Aries (constellation) by Keilana. Aries the Ram (symbol ♈) is one of the constellations of the Zodiac and one of 88 currently recognised constellations. Its area is 441 square degrees (1.1% of the celestial sphere). Although fairly dim, with only three bright stars, it is home to several deep-sky objects.
No cases were closed or opened, leaving the number of open cases at three. ... The case concerns alleged misconduct with regards to aggressive responses and harassment by Fæ toward users who question his actions.
The results from last month's trial of the LastModified extension were published this week on the Wikimedia blog. The first analyses have indicated a significant positive impact, suggesting that the extension – which makes the time since a page's last edit much more prominent in the interface – could eventually find its way onto Wikimedia wikis.
Thanks as ever for your much appreciated copy edits over at Embedded liberalism. I read your edit summary about not understanding it. You’re obviously well read and well above average in political awareness, so if folk like you dont understand my work Im a little concerned Im wasting my time. Ive tried to frame the subject more clearly in the lede, maybe its now more understandable?
Thanks very much for the message and the advice. Im much happier now you've said your comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek :-) . FeydHuxtable (talk) 19:00, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
In economist's parlance, your excellent copy editing creates a "perverse incentive" for me never to learn the correct spelling of "consensus". At least its good for the Kitten economyFeydHuxtable (talk) 11:31, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 9,824 last month to 9,880 on June 28th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 78 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 70. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 56 out of a total number of 3,009 articles.
Currently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
Did You Know?
At the suggestion of a member I have added Did You Know? entries for the project to the article activity section of the newsletter. Not having had any entries since January this month saw seven Yorkshire related articles appear in this front page section. There is a list of the recent entries from the project's articles on the main project page with a full list here.
When working on an article it is always worth considering if it can be nominated for the Did You Know? section on the main page. May be a little more work but it does get the article recognised and exposed to a wider audience. The main requirements for a nomination are that, within the last five days, it was created, expanded fivefold or, for an unsourced BLP, newly referenced and expanded twofold. If you think an article meets these basic requirements then take a look at the eligibility criteria and make a nomination. The hook is the important part of the process as that is the text that will appear on the front page and this must be mentioned in the article with an appropriate inline citation to back it up. If you can suggest more than one hook for an article then the more chances of it been selected for inclusion on the front page. If you do nominate it is important to keep an eye on the nomination as there may be questions/suggestions from those reviewing the hooks that you will need to respond to if the nomination is to succeed.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The July 2012 articles selected below are suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered July 2012 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 08:50, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
User:Fæ was elected as the inaugural chair of the new Wikimedia Chapters Association, despite the controversies that have surrounded Fæ on the English Wikipedia and Commons, most recently aired in a live case before the Arbitration Committee. This is in marked contrast with unexciting movement, during the Wikimania meeting, on the most important issues facing the establishment of the association.
During Wikimania (July 12-15), the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) board finalized and enacted long-discussed reforms of the movement's financial structures, and considered procedures for creating new ways for Wikimedians to organize themselves into offline communities. The board moved on the controversial image filter issue, approved the 2012–13 annual plan, and issued a statement on the wikitravel proposal. It also appointed the two new chapter-selected trustees and elected the four office-bearers.
With the Tour de France in its final week, we traveled to the French Wikipedia for a chat with Projet Cyclisme (WikiProject Cycling). The French Wikipedia places a greater emphasis on portals than the English Wikipedia, which explains why WikiProject Cycling and its discussion page are actually extensions of the Cycling Portal. The project is home to two Article de Qualité (equivalent to Featured Articles) and eight Bon Article (Good Articles), primarily biographies of cyclists.
A brief overview of the current discussions on the English Wikipedia, including one regarding the purpose of the Community Portal. Started by Maryana, a Wikimedia Foundation employee, is this page for new users to be educated about the community, or is it for experienced users to find updates about the community?
Nearly 1400 Wikimedians and others from 87 countries descended on the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C., for Wikimania 2012. Even with an unprecedented number (1400) of conference attendees — the previous two Wikimanias, held in Gdańsk (Poland) and Haifa (Israel), were attended by fewer than 1100 people combined – Wikimania 2012 was a complete success, with attendees' reaction to the conference coming out as ecstatic and laudatory.
Eight featured articles were promoted this week, including Paul McCartney by GabeMc. McCartney (born 1942) is an English musician, singer, songwriter and composer. He gained worldwide fame as a member of the Beatles, and his collaboration with John Lennon is highly celebrated. After the band's break-up he pursued a solo career and formed the band Wings. McCartney has been described by Guinness World Records as the "most successful composer and recording artist of all time", and his song "Yesterday" has been covered more than any other song in history.
As Wikimania, the annual conference targeted at Wikimedians and often well attended by those with a technical slant, draws to a close, comments have already begun to come in from attendees regarding the many tech-related features of the conference.
No cases were closed or opened, leaving the number of open cases at three. A new remedy in the Fæ case calls for him to be indefinitely banned from the site after his attempts to solicit intervention from the Foundation, claiming that publicly listing all his accounts would be too onerous due to "ongoing security risks." He was further criticised for attempting to dodge good-faith concerns; the committee believes that if Fæ's claims are valid then he must be removed from the community.
RepliedRegarding my request to have the article deleted, it was my first attempt! I had the idea to do it early on Wednesday evening whilst undoing my revert. I had thought Douglas would have already done it. Thought I'd check the talk page, and used Twinkle from there! I have moved User:TenPoundHammer's section on my page into Douglas's for continuity. What happens next? Any further advice would be much appreciated.
Does Wikipedia pay? is an ongoing Signpost series seeking to illuminate paid editing, paid advocacy, for-profit Wikipedia consultants, editing public relations professionals, conflict of interest guidelines in practice, and the Wikipedians who work on these issues... by speaking openly with the people involved.
The Signpost's goal is to provide readers with essential information about the Wikimedia movement and the English Wikipedia – both of which have become large and extremely complex institutions that require timely, balanced and in-depth coverage.
Two weeks ago the Signpost reported that the Russian Wikipedia had just begun a 24-hour blackout in protest at a bill that was before the Russian parliament that proposed mechanisms to block IP addresses and DNS records. The protest, implemented after on-wiki consensus was reached during the preceding days, concerned the potential of the amendment to the information law to allow extra-judicial censorship of the internet in Russia, including the closure of access to the Russian Wikipedia. Among the questions now are how effective the blackout was and where we go from here in terms of internet freedom in one of the world's biggest and most influential countries.
With the 2012 Summer Olympic Games beginning this weekend in London, we decided to catch up with the chaps at WikiProject Olympics. The last time we interviewed WikiProject Olympics was in February 2010 when the project was gearing up for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. We wanted to know how the project has grown since then and whether preparing for a Summer Olympics was more grueling.
For the second time this year (and the third in the history of the committee), there are no open cases, as all three active cases were closed last week.
There has never been a better time to improve the behavior of marketing professionals on Wikipedia. For the first time we're seeing self-imposed statements of ethics. Professional PR bodies around the globe have supported the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) guidance for ethical Wikipedia engagement. Although their tone is different, CREWE and the PRSA have brought more attention to the issues. Awareness among PR professionals is rising. So are the number of paid editing operations sprouting up and the opportunity for dialogue.
One featured article was promoted this week, Melville Island. A small peninsula in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, it was discovered by Europeans in the 1600s and initially used for storehouses. The land was purchased by the British and used to hold prisoners of war, then to receive escaped slaves from the United States. After being used as a place of quarantine and later a recruitment centre, the land was granted to Canada in 1907 and used to house prisoners of war. It is now home to the clubhouse and marina of the Armdale Yacht Club.
Wikimedia Foundation published its Annual Plan, focusing on technical improvements, editor retention, and structural reforms over the coming year. The movement's total revenue, including almost all chapter funding, is slated to rise by 35%, from $34.2 million to $46.1 million, and global spending to more than $42.1 million. The foundation's own core spending will grow by 15% to $30.2 million in 2012–13.
We continue our Summer Sports Series this week with WikiProject Horse Racing. Started in November 2005, the project has grown to include nearly 8,000 articles maintained by 34 active members. There are 10 Featured Articles and 19 Good Articles included in the project's scope. In addition to preparing articles for GA and FA status, the project attempts to create requested articles and locate requested images. We interviewed Redrose64, Montanabw, Tigerboy1966, Ealdgyth, and Cuddy Wifter.
Eight new featured articles, five new featured lists, and eight new featured pictures. The highlights include a new featured picture of Frank Sinatra, created by William P. Gottlieb and nominated by Tomer T. Sinatra (1915–98) was a highly successful American singer and film actor whose career spanned 60 years. This image dates from around 1947.
In the light of recent questions over the long-term reliability of Wikimedia wikis, the Signpost caught up with CT Woo, the Wikimedia Foundation's director of technical operations.
Arbitrator Kirill Lokshin proposed a motion requiring the alteration of any instances of an editor's previous username in arbitration decisions to reflect their name changes. The Devil's Advocate has initiated an amendment request for the controversial Race and intelligence case.
Thank you for your comment, I am, obviously, new to editing wiki pages. My intentions for editing the PLOS ONE wiki page goes along with all PLOS collateral we have out on the internet for public consumption. Our organization has just gone through a new style guide change and have updated our logo from PLoS to PLOS. http://www.plos.org/new-plos-look/ While I understand the heated debate in the PLOS ONE talk section, what I am implementing is PLOS-wide and a neccessity. It was unintentional in changing the links to make them invalid, however I did purposfully attempt to change the logo to find out that I am not allowed to upload new images for another 4 days.
Any guidance you could provide would be greatly appreciated, if this was the incorrect way to reach back out to you, I apologize.
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.
Within the project, discussions included the Hammersmith & City line navbox, the deletion of Template:London Underground Tube Stations & Rolling Stock and links to London Underground usage data figures not working
Within other related projects, relevant discussions included were on the Olympics, notability of railway magzines, various railway templates, waterways become active routes on Google Maps, bus station categories and notability of a bus type and a bus builder.
Requests
If you want to post a request for help with an article, finding a photograph or seeking reference material, contact the editor
Henri Cogan was mainly a stuntman and fight choreographer. He usually played only tiny roles and his characters often had no names. If you watch these films you can easily miss his appearance if you are not given a description of his role.
Well, I took the filmography from the French Wiki article, checked which films have been released in English-speaking countries too and translated some of the role descriptions.
Cogan deserves a Wiki article because his work was pivotal for Eddie Constantine's success. Cogan was his boxing instructor and without this training Constantine would probably not have qualified for the role of Lemmy Caution. Later Constantine wouldn't sign a film contract unless Cogan was hired too. This has all been said in a contemporary German article:
Zucker für den Affen (Stuff for fun)
There is even a photograph of Cogan "at work". My father, like so many of his generation, never knew Cogan's name, but when he recognised his face on the screen he could tell a big brawl was underway... Does any of that answer your question?
NordhornerII_The man from Nordhorn 01:00, 8 August 2012 (UTC) (talk)
While I expanded the English article I also updated the filmography of the French version. When I wrote "habitant" I was a little tired because all this had taken more time than planned. Yes, I am really from Nordhorn. I work in Münster though. NordhornerII _The man from Nordhorn 22:36, 9 August 2012 (UTC)(talk)
London's utility bosses agree action plan for less disruptive roadworks
Tube set to post most reliable performance figures for a decade
Spiderweb reduces theft on London transport by 14 per cent
February
Contractors shortlisted to save tens of millions of pounds through new joint highway works
Read it and bin it, newspapers can cause Tube delays
Crime continues to fall on London's bus network
First passengers jump aboard the new bus for London
Mayor brings London's rail industry together to get set for the London 2012 Games
Freight operators and their customers urged to prepare for London 2012 Games with launch of new campaign
Crystal Palace improvement work to begin
New online process announced for London Service Permits
Mayor steps up HGV safety campaign to benefit cyclists and pedestrians
New card to make travel easier for people with hidden disabilities
Art on the Underground launches Canary Wharf Screen at Tube station
Cycling grants to help communities ride to the 2012 Games
Blackfriars Underground station reopens to cater for influx of passengers
Work begins to cool the platforms at two major central London stations
War on fare dodgers increases as penalty charges go up this weekend
Less than one month to go until Barclays Cycle Hire goes east
Changes to travel around Paddington Station due to Crossrail works
Incident response on the Tube to be boosted under 'Blue Light' trial
London Tramlink upgrade continues
TfL confirms priority junctions for cycle safety review
Project News
Articles
Baker Street and Waterloo Railway is on track to be Today's Featured Article on the Main Page on 10th March, the 106th anniversary of the line's opening
Since in various guises I assembled about 90% of this page I can confess that its usefulness is almost nil and I would relent to another's accusing me of essentially assembling a 'vanity page.' So when I referred to non-Americans having no interest in the 125th PA page, I was ridiculing my own interest in the page. Self-deprecation can diffuse hostility, except in cases where every word is being analyzed for an angle of attack.
There a very, very few living people reading Regimental Histories from the Civil War. There are fewer outside of the United States.
The oddness of the 125th's RH is how devoted the survivors were to an RH for a nine-month Regiment. The Regiment had several great minds among the survivors, and for some reason, they devoted large pieces of their lives to polishing and perfecting their RH.
My own theory is, they gave their lives (i.e., time) out of dedication to those who actually lost their lives. I'm self-aware enough to know that my own theories are simply more vanity. Another with a theory that a single source of estimating Civil War casualties has achieved "perfection" in this incredible imprecise arena has no awareness of his own folly. Actually, I'm self aware enought to know that this writing will be skimmed over for sources of abuse and not really absorbed.
My master's degree is largely statitics. There's a difference between a population parameter and a sample statistic. You assemble a sample statistic as an estimate of a population parameter. The greatest statistician of my lifetime said, "Parameters are unknown and unknowable." The average height of American male? It's somewhere aroung 69.5" The "perfect number" is known only to God because, as I typed, several men died and several others achieved adulthood.--Donaldecoho (talk) 10:04, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
When you go to Antietam, there might be a man doing an impression of Color Sergeant George Simpson. He'll have a large 34-star flag and an 1850 Officer's Sword. He goes there to teach history, in general, and the 125th PA in particular.
I wish you could have been there when this one 12-year-old boy from Texas* approached. He was with me for more than an hour, and HE'LL be the one who will be reading RHs in the future.--Donaldecoho (talk) 10:46, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
I should confess: when I encounter Texans at Antietam, I point out towards the 'Great Cornfield,' and I ask them, "Do you know why you should be proud to be a Texan?" and followup up with "Out there, the 1st TX Infantry fought and received the GREATEST NUMBER OF CASUALTIES OF ANY SINGLE CIVIL WAR REGIMENT FOR A SINGLE DAY DURING THE ENTIRE CIVIL WAR!"
Jesperson's favorite, Busey, will promote the 1MN to 'Top Honors,' which I'm **MORE THAN** than fine with at a personal level, but I see more Texans than Minnesotans at the Battlefield. Since the North won the war Yankees are generally complacent and uninterested.
Somebody from Alabama asked me directly in the presence of her 8-year-old son, "Was the Civil War REALLY about slavery?" I choked back my truest feelings and answered, "That's a matter of opinion, Mam. Whose opinion do you want?"
To reflect my truest feelings, I'll quote verbatim Lincoln from memory,
"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. And under a just God cannot long retain it." April 6, 1859 in a letter to Henry Pierce.
I should also mention that I do this on Saturdays without pay of my own volition. I have no sanction or endorsement from the NPS.
Now that I think about it, it would be more convenient to do Color Sergeant Roland Morris of 13MA at Gettysburg. Gbg is closer and I would be less pissed off about Jesperson and ICARUSPHOENIX's BS while I'm doing it.
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.
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 9,880 last month to 9,942 on July 25th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 83 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 72. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 56 out of a total number of 3,022 articles.
Currently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
Sporting feast
Just in case it has escaped members notice but August is a big sporting month with the 2012 Olympic Games taking place at the start of the month and the 2012–13 Football season getting under way from the middle of the month. There are likely to be lots of articles that will need changing as we go through the month with new signings, new records etc. so keep an eye on sport related articles and try and keep them up to date.
I have picked a pair of sport related items for this month's collaboration from the suggestions on the project talk page. So those of you with a sporting slant should have plenty to get going with this month.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The August 2012 articles selected below are suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered August 2012 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 14:34, 16 August 2012 (UTC)
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.
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.
Some of Wikimedia's most valuable photographs have been shot and uploaded under free licenses as a direct result of the annual Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) event each September. Last year, the project was conducted on a European level, resulting in the submission of an extraordinary 168,208 free images of cultural heritage sites ("monuments") from 18 countries, making it the world's largest photographic competition. Organising the 2012 event—which has just opened and will run for the full month of September—has required input from chapters and volunteers in 35 countries.
Developers are currently discussing the possibility of a MediaWiki Foundation to oversee those aspects of MediaWiki development that relate to non-Wikimedia wikis. The proposal was generated after a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list about generalising Wikimedia's CentralAuth system.
Five featured pictures were promoted this week, including a video explaining the recent landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars. NASA called the final minutes of the complicated landing procedure "the seven minutes of terror".
Since May 2012 I've been a Wikimedia Foundation community fellow with the task of researching and improving dispute resolution on English Wikipedia. Surveying members of the community has revealed much about their thoughts on and experiences with dispute resolution. I've analysed processes to determine their use and effectiveness, and have presented ideas that I hope will improve the future of dispute resolution.
Thanks to the initiative of Yuvi Panda and Notnarayan, the Signpost now has an Android app, free for download on Google Play. ... but would readers be interested in an iOS app for Apple devices?
Much like article content, the English Wikipedia's help pages have grown organically over the years. Although this has produced a great deal of useful documentation, with time many of the pages have become poorly maintained or have grown overwhelmingly complicated.
Philip Roth, a widely known and acclaimed American author, wrote an open letter in the New Yorker addressed to Wikipedia this week, alleging severe inaccuracies in the article on his The Human Stain (2000).
After a week's hiatus, the WikiProject Report returns with an interview featuring WikiProject Fungi. Started in March 2006, the project has grown to include over 9,000 pages, including 47 Featured Articles and 176 Good Articles. The project maintains a list of high priority missing articles and stubs that need expansion.
In dramatic events that came to light last week, two English Wikipedia volunteers—Doc James (James Heilman) and Wrh2 (Ryan Holliday)—are being sued in the Los Angeles County Superior Court by Internet Brands, the owner of Wikitravel.com. Both Wikipedians have also been volunteer Wikitravel editors (and in Holliday's case, a volunteer administrator). IB's complaints focus on both editors' encouragement of their fellow Wikitravel volunteers to migrate to a proposed non-commercial travel guidance site that would be under the umbrella of the WMF.
In its September issue, the peer-reviewed journal First Monday published The readability of Wikipedia, reporting research which shows that the English Wikipedia is struggling to meet Flesch reading ease test criteria, while the Simple English Wikipedia has "lost its focus".
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for August 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, phase 1 of which is edging its way towards its first deployment).
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 9,880 last month to 9,942 on July 25th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 83 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 72. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 56 out of a total number of 3,065 articles.
Currently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
Schools back
This month is the time for the start of a new school year. All of those pupils going to a new school will be looking for information on their new school and so the school articles under the project's banner will get higher than usual hits. It would be good if members could keep an eye out for vandalism and the addition of vanity entries on the local school articles.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The September 2012 articles selected below are suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered September 2012 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
"Welcome, and thank you for your attempt to lighten up Wikipedia. However, this is an encyclopedia and the articles are intended to be serious, so please don't make joke edits, as you did to Yolo County, California. Readers looking for accurate information will not find them amusing. If you'd like to experiment with editing, try the sandbox, where you can write practically anything you want. DBaK (talk) 22:54, 16 September 2012 (UTC)"
This week, we shine the spotlight on the Indian Cinema Task Force, a subproject that seeks to improve the quality and quantity of articles about Indian cinema. As a child of WikiProject Film and WikiProject India, the Indian Cinema Task Force shares a variety of templates, resources, and members with its parent projects. The task force works on a to-do list, maintains the Bollywood Portal, and ensures articles follow the film style guidelines. With Indian cinema celebrating its 100th year of existence in 2013, we asked Karthik Nadar (Karthikndr), Secret of success, Ankit Bhatt, Dwaipayan, and AnimeshKulkarni what is in store for the Indian Cinema Task Force.
The world's largest photo competition, Wiki Loves Monuments, is entering its final two weeks. The month-long event, of Dutch origin, is being held globally for the first time after the success of its European-level predecessor last year. During September 2011 more than 5000 volunteers from 18 countries took part and uploaded 168,208 free images. This year, volunteers and chapters from 35 countries around the world have organised the event. The best photographs will be determined by juries at the national and finally the global level.
1.20wmf12, the 12th release to Wikimedia wikis from the 1.20 branch, was deployed to its first wikis on September 17; if things go well, it will be deployed to all wikis by September 26. Its 200 or so changes – 111 to WMF-deployed extensions plus 98 to core MediaWiki code – include support for links with mixed-case protocols (e.g. Http://example.com) and the removal of the "No higher resolution available" message on the file description pages of SVG images.
Oliver Keyes' (User:Ironholds) defense of Wikipedia against the recent Philip Roth controversy has drawn a significant amount of attention over the last week. The problems between Roth, a widely known and acclaimed American author, and Wikipedia arose from an open letter he penned for the American magazine New Yorker, and were covered by the Signpost two weeks ago. Keyes—who wrote the piece as a prominent Wikipedian but is also a contractor for the Wikimedia Foundation—wrote a blog post on the topic, lamenting the factual errors in Roth's letter and criticizing the media for not investigating his claims: "[they took] Roth’s explanation as the truth and launched into a lengthy discussion of how we [Wikipedia] handle primary sourcing."
A paper to appear in a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist (summarized in the research index) sheds new light on the English Wikipedia's declining editor growth and retention trends. The paper describes how "several changes that the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have lead to a more restrictive environment for newcomers". The number of active Wikipedia editors has been declining since 2007 and research examining data up to September 2009 has shown that the root of the problem has been the declining retention of new editors. The authors show this decline is mainly due to a decline among desirable, good-faith newcomers, and point to three factors contributing to the increasingly "restrictive environment" they face.
This week, we tinkered with WikiProject Robotics. From the project's inception in December 2007, it has served as Wikipedia's hub for building and improving articles about robots and robotics, accumulating two Featured Articles and seven Good Articles along the way. The project covers both fictitious and real-life robots, the technology that powers them, and many of the brains behind the robotics field
In the second controversy to engulf Wikimedia UK in two months, its immediate past chair Roger Bamkin has resigned from the board of the chapter. The resignation last Wednesday followed a growing furore over the conflict of interest between two of Roger's roles outside the chapter and his close involvement in the UK board's decision-making process, including the access to private mailing lists that board members in all chapters need. But the irony surrounding Roger's resignation is its connection with efforts by Wikimedians and collaborators to strengthen the reach of Wikimedia projects through technical innovation.
Late last month, the "Technology report" included a story using code review backlog figures – the only code review figures then available – to construct a rough narrative about the average experience of code contributors. This week, we hope to go one better, by looking directly at code review wait times, and, in particular, median code review times
I'd like to extend a cordial invitation to you to join the Ten Year Society, an informal group for editors who've been participating in the Wikipedia project for ten years or more.
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 9,942 last month to 10,141 on September 27th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 87 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 72. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 57 out of a total number of 3,102 articles.
Currently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The October 2012 articles selected below are suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered October 2012 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 08:58, 1 October 2012 (UTC)
Got off on the wrong foot
Sorry I think we got off on the wrong foot, I apologise for any offence caused, but I wouldn't mind having an enlightened debate on the topic with you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Justgravy (talk • contribs) 10:43, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
Does Wikipedia Pay? is a Signpost series seeking to illuminate paid editing, paid advocacy, for-profit Wikipedia consultants, editing public relations professionals, conflict of interest guidelines in practice, and the Wikipedians who work on these issues by speaking openly with the people involved. This week, a scandal centering around Roger Bamkin's work with Wikimedia UK and Gibraltarpedia erupted ... In light of these events, opinions on how to avoid future controversy are as important as ever. ... The Signpost spoke with Jimmy Wales to better understand how he views the paid editing environment and what he thinks is needed to improve it.
Following considerable online and media reportage on the Gibraltar controversy and a Signpost report last week, the Wikimedia UK chapter and the foundation published a joint statement on September 28: "To better understand the facts and details of these allegations and to ensure that governance arrangements commensurate with the standing of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia UK and the worldwide Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia UK's trustees and the Wikimedia Foundation will jointly appoint an independent expert advisor to objectively review both Wikimedia UK's governance arrangements and its handling of the conflict of interest."
The Toolserver is an external service hosting the hundreds of webpages and scripts (collectively known as "tools") that assist Wikimedia communities in dozens of mostly menial tasks. Few people think that it has been operating well recently; the problems, which include high database replication lag and periods of total downtime, have caused considerable disruption to the Toolserver's usual functions. Those functions are highly valued by many Wikimedia communities ... In 2011, the Foundation announced the creation of Wikimedia Labs, a much better funded project that among other things aimed to mimic the Toolserver's functionality by mid-2013. At the same time, Erik Möller, the WMF's director of engineering, announced that the Foundation would no longer be supporting the Toolserver financially, but would continue to provide the same in-kind support as it had done previously.
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the James Bond film series, we spent some time bonding with WikiProject James Bond. The project is in the unique position of having already pushed all of its primary content to Good and Featured status, including all of Ian Fleming's novels, short stories, and every film that has been released. Work has begun in earnest on the article Skyfall for the release of the new Bond film later this month. The project could still use help improving articles about Bond actors, characters, gadgets, music, video games, and related topics
Within the project, discussions included links to London Underground usage data figures not working, Herne Hill station appearing on the main page and Docklands Light Railway usage now being available
Within other related projects, relevant discussions included were on the Olympics, notability of railway magzines, various railway templates, waterways become active routes on Google Maps, bus station categories and notability of a bus type and a bus builder.
Requests
If you want to post a request for help with an article, finding a photograph or seeking reference material, contact the editor
Wikipedia in education is far from a new idea: years of news stories, op-eds, and editorials have focused on the topic; and on Wikipedia itself, the Schools and universities projects page has existed in various forms since 2003. Over the next six years, the page was rarely developed, and when it did advance there was no clear goal in mind.
On this day five years ago, the WikiProject Report debuted as a new Signpost column with an overview of WikiProject Biography. Today, we're celebrating two milestone: five years of the WikiProject Report and the tenth birthday of our first featured project. WikiProject Biography is by far the largest WikiProject on Wikipedia, with over one million articles under the project's scope. As a comparison, WikiProject Biography is three times larger than Wikipedia's second largest project, and if WikiProject Biography were split into its 14 subprojects and work groups, it would still make the list of the 20 largest WikiProjects... four times.
This week the Signpost interviews Arsenikk, an editor of six years who has brought sixteen lists through our featured list process, mostly regarding transportation in Norway but also about the 1952 Winter Olympics and World Heritage Sites in Africa. Arsenikk tells us about why he joined the project, what moves him, and how editors can join the sometimes daunting world of featured lists.
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for September 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, phase 1 of which is edging its way towards its first deployment). Three of the seven headline items in the report have already been covered in the Signpost: problems with the corruption of several Gerrit (code) repositories, the introduction of widespread translation memory across Wikimedia wikis, and the launch of the "Page Curation" tool on the English Wikipedia, with development work on that project now winding down. The report also drew attention to the end of Google Summer of Code 2012, the deployment to the English Wikipedia of a new ePUB (electronic book) export feature, and improvements to the WLM app aimed at more serious photographers.
There is wide agreement among English Wikipedians that the administrator system is in some ways broken—but no consensus on how to fix it. Most suggestions have been relatively small in scope, and could at best produce small improvements. I would like to make a proposal to fundamentally restructure the administrator system, in a way that I believe would make it more effective and responsive. The proposal is to create an elected Administration Committee ("AdminCom") which would select, oversee, and deselect administrators.
This week saw a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal on editorial debates in Wikipedia. The story focused on the title-naming dispute surrounding the Beatles article, and specifically the RfC on whether the 'the' in the band's name should be capitalized or not.
On the English Wikipedia, five featured articles, ten featured lists, and four featured pictures were promoted, including USS Lexington, a ship built for the United States Navy that, although ordered in 1916 as a battlecruiser, was converted to an aircraft carrier. It was sunk in the Battle of the Coral Sea during the Second World War.
The volunteer-led Wikimedia Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) and interested community members are looking at Wikimedia organization applications worth about US$10.4 million out of the committee's first full year's operation, in just the inaugural round one of two that have been planned for the year with a planned budget of US$11.4M.
A trial of the first phase of Wikimedia Deutschland's "Wikidata" project–implementing the first ever interwiki repository—may soon get underway following the successful passage of much of its code through MediaWiki's review processes this week.
This week, we experimented with WikiProject Chemicals. Started in August 2004, WikiProject Chemicals has grown to include over 10,000 articles about chemical compounds. The project has a unique assessment system that omits C-class, Good, and Featured Articles. As a result, the project's 11 GAs and 9 FAs are treated as A-class articles. WikiProject Chemicals is a child of WikiProject Chemistry (interviewed in 2009) and a parent of WikiProject Polymers.
Unlike the long-running disputes that have characterised attempts to reform the RfA process on the English Wikipedia, the German Wikipedia's tradition of making decisions not by consensus but knife-edged 50% + 1 votes has led to a fundamentally different outcome. In 2009, the project managed to largely settle the RfA mode issue in 2009 indirectly.
One clarification request concerns the civility enforcement case – specifically, Malleus Fatuorum's perceived circumvention of his topic ban. It has resulted in thousands of bytes spent in vitriolic discussions, multiple blocks, and "no confidence" motions against the Arbitration Committee and one arbitrator, among other ramifications.
Planning for Wikivoyage's migration into the WMF fold built up steam this week following a statement by WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller about what the technical side of the migration will involve. Wikivoyage, which split from sister site Wikitravel in 2006, is hoping to migrate its own not-inconsiderable user base to Wikimedia, as well as much of its content, presenting novel challenges for Wikimedia developers
It is well known that women are underrepresented in the sciences, and that high-achieving female scientists have often been excluded from authorship lists and passed over for awards and honours solely on the basis of gender. Also significant has been the underplaying in the academic literature, news reporting, and online, of women's current and historical contributions to science.
The WikiProject Report normally brings tidings from Wikipedia's most active, inventive, and unique WikiProjects. This week, we're trying something new by focusing on Wikipedia's dark side: the various regional and national WikiProjects that are dead or dying. How can some tiny municipalities and exclaves generate highly active, cross-language, multimedia platforms be successful while the projects representing many sovereign countries and entire continents wallow in obscurity? Today, we'll search for answers among geographic projects large and small, highly active and barely functioning, enthusiastic about the future and mired in past conflicts.
The first round of the Wikimedia Foundation's new financial arrangements has proceeded as planned, with the publication of scores and feedback by Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) staff on applications for funding by 11 entities—10 chapters, independent membership organisations supporting the WMF's mission in different countries, and the foundation itself. The results are preliminary assessments that will soon be put to the FDC's seven voting members and two non-voting board representatives. The FDC in turn will send its recommendations to the board of trustees on 15 November, which will announce its decision by 15 December. Funding applications have been on-wiki since 1 October, and the talk pages of applications were open for community comment and discussion from 2 to 22 October, though apart from queries by FDC staff, there was little activity.
This week, we're checking out ways to motivate editors and recognize valuable contributions by focusing on the awards and rewards of WikiProject Military History. Anyone unfamiliar with WikiProject Military History is encouraged to start at the report's first article about the project and make your way forward. While many WikiProjects provide a barnstar that can be awarded to helpful contributors, WikiProject Military History has gone a step further by creating a variety of awards with different criteria ranging from the all-purpose WikiChevrons to rewards for participating in drives and improving special topics to medals for improving articles up to A-class status to the coveted "Military Historian of the Year" award.
The TimedMediaHandler extension (TMH), which brings dramatic improvements to MediaWiki's video handling capabilities, will go live to the English Wikipedia this week following a long and turbulent development, WMF Director of Platform Engineering Rob Lanphier announced on Monday ... Wikidata.org, a new repository designed to host interwiki links, launched this week and will begin accepting links shortly. The site, which is one half of the forthcoming Wikidata trial (the other half being the Wikidata client, which will be deployed to the Hungarian Wikipedia shortly) will also act as a testing area for phase 2 of Wikidata (centralised data storage). The longer term plan is for Wikidata.org to become a "Wikimedia Commons for data" as phases 2 and 3 (dynamic lists) are developed, project managers say.
A paper in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, coming from the social control perspective and employing the repertory grid technique, has contributed interesting observations about the governance of Wikipedia.
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 10,141 last month to 10,234 on October 28th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 88 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 72. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 57 out of a total number of 3,140 articles.
Currently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The November 2012 articles selected below are suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered November 2012 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
J Milburn is a British editor who has been on the site since 2006. He is one of two judges of the WikiCup. Here, he uses an op-ed to explain the way the WikiCup works and to review this year's competition, which ended recently.
The results of most of the national heats for Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) have been published on Commons. A maximum of 10 images have been submitted by all but eight of the 34 participating countries, and the international jury for what is the largest competition of its type in the world is set to announce the global winner in four weeks' time.
Hurricane Sandy was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record and has caused millions of dollars in damage. Naturally, Wikipedia covered it. But was Wikipedia's coverage unbiased?
This week, the Signpost interviewed two editors. The first, PumpkinSky, collaborated with Gerda Arendt in writing the recently featured article on Franz Kafka and won second prize in the Core contest last August. The second, Cwmhiraeth, collaborated with Thompsma in promoting the article Frog, which was featured last week. We asked them about the special challenges faced while writing Core content and things to watch out for.
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for October 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. TimedMediaHandler also went live.
This week, The Signpost sings along with WikiProject Songs which focuses on articles about songs of every generation and genre. The project initially began as a rough outline in October 2002 and was reimagined in March 2004 using its parent WikiProject Albums as a template.
Last week, media outlets reported a ruling by a German court on the problem of businesses using Wikipedia for marketing purposes. The issue goes beyond the direct management of marketing-related edits by Wikipedians; it involves cross-monitoring and interacting among market competitors themselves on Wikipedia. A company that sells dietary supplements made from frankincense had taken a competitor to court. The recently published judgment by the Higher Regional Court of Munich, in dealing with the German Wikipedia article on frankincense products, was handed down in May and is based on European competition law.
In late September, the Technology report published its findings about (particularly median) code review times. To the 23,900 changesets analysed the first time (the data for which has been updated), the Signpost added data from the 9,000 or so changesets contributed between September 17 and November 9 to a total of 93,000 reviews across 45,000 patchsets. Bots and self-reviews were also discarded, but reviews made by a different user in the form of a superseding patch were retained. Finally, users were categorised by hand according to whether they would be best regarded as staff or volunteers. The new analyses were consistent with the predictions of the previous analysis.
As promised, we're expanding our horizons by featuring projects that cover underrepresented areas of the globe. This week, we headed to WikiProject Brazil which keeps track of articles about the world's largest Portuguese-speaking country. The project has shown spurts of activity and continues to serve as a hub for discussions, despite the project's collaborations, peer reviews, and outreach activities being largely inactive.
The WMF's Funds Dissemination Committee has published its recommendations for the inaugural round 1 of funding. Requests totalled US$10.4M, nearly all of the FDC's budget for both first and second rounds. The seven-member committee of community volunteers appointed in September advises the WMF board on the distribution of grant funds among applying Wikimedia organizations. The committee, which has a separate operating budget of $276k for salaries and expenses, considered 12 applications for funds, from 11 chapters and from the WMF itself for its non-core activities. The decision-making process included community and FDC staff input after October 1, the closing date for submissions. Taken together, the volunteers decided to endorse an average of 81% of the funding sought—a total of $8.43M, which went to 11 of the 12 applicants. This leaves $2.71M to be distributed in round 2, for which applications are due in little more than three months' time.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Turtles. The young project started in January 2011 and has accumulated 5 Featured Articles, 3 Featured Lists, and 6 Featured Pictures. The project maintains a combined to-do list and hot articles meter, a popular pages ranking, and a collection of resources for turtle articles. We interviewed Faendalimas and NYMFan69-86.
WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner was forced to clarify this week that proposed structural changes to the Foundation's Engineering and Product Development Department were not a "done deal" and that it was "important that you [particularly affected staff] realise that ... your input is wanted". The reorganisation, announced on November 5 and planned for the middle of next year, will see its two components split off into their own departments.
Seven featured articles, four featured lists and ten featured pictures – including the photograph that spawned the Streisand effect – were promoted this week.
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include the question of ticker symbol placement and the notability of various types of creative performer.
On November 24, a general assembly of Wikimedia Germany (WMDE) voted on the fate of the Wikimedia Toolserver, a central external piece of technical infrastructure supporting the editing communities with volunteer-developed scripts and webpages of various kinds that are assisting in performing mostly menial tasks.
An open-access preprint presents the results from a study attempting to predict early box office revenues from Wikipedia traffic and activity data. The authors – a team of computational social scientists from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Aalto University and the Central European University – submit that behavioral patterns on Wikipedia can be used for accurate forecasting, matching and in some cases outperforming the use of social media data for predictive modeling. The results, based on a corpus of 312 English Wikipedia articles on movies released in 2010, indicate that the joint editing activity and traffic measures on Wikipedia are strong predictors of box office revenue for highly successful movies.
Wikidata, the new "Wikimedia Commons for data" and the first new Wikimedia project since 2006, reached 100,000 entries this week. The project aims to be a single, human- and machine-readable database for common data, spanning across all Wikipedia projects, which will "lead to a higher consistency and quality within Wikipedia articles, as well as increased availability of information in the smaller language editions" while lowering the burden on Wikipedia's volunteer editors—whose numbers have stalled overall, and continue to dwindle on the English Wikipedia.
This week, we uncovered WikiProject Deletion Sorting, Wikipedia's most active project by number of edits to all the project's pages. This special project seeks to increase participation in Articles for Deletion nominations by categorizing the AfD discussions by various topic areas that may draw the attention of editors. The project was started in August 2005 with manual processes that are continued today by a bevy of bots, categories, and transclusions. The project took inspiration from WikiProject Stub Sorting and some historical discussions on deletion reform. As the sheer number of AfDs continues to grow, the project is seeking better tools to manage the deletion sorting process and attract editors to comment on these deletion discussions.
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 10,234 last month to 10,275 on November 27th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 91 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 72. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 57 out of a total number of 3,163 articles.
Currently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
Signpost
The editors over at the weekly Signpost, that goes out to a large number of people on Wikipedia, have indicated that they would like to feature the Yorkshire project in one of the future editions. There was an invitation on the project's talk page for members to get involved in this by responding to a series of questions. It is disappointing that no members have stepped forward to respond to this but they have gone on my responses and the project should be featured in the 3rd December issue of the magazine.
Happy Christmas
It is Christmas time again so I would like to take this opportunity to wish all members of the project a happy Christmas.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The December 2012 articles selected below are an editor choice as there were no further suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered December 2012 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
Deployments of MediaWiki 1.21wmf5 cause widespread problems for users across wikis when HTML and CSS updates came temporarily out of sync. On the first wikis targeted for deployment, this was caused by the different cache invalidation rates for HTML (typically one month) and CSS (typically five minutes). The retrospective on the problem highlighted the fact that that the test wiki – the WMF's answer to a production environment that individual developers can no longer practically emulate themselves – actually demonstrated the exact problem that would later manifest itself on production wikis. It went unnoticed.
This week, we went searching for white roses in the lands of WikiProject Yorkshire. The project began in May 2007 as a way to improve articles about the historic English county of Yorkshire and its modern-day administrative divisions and cities. Since then, the project has accumulated 31 Featured Articles, 14 Featured Lists, 91 Good Articles, and a monstrous list of Did You Know entries. Despite all of the effort improving Yorkshire articles, the project has experienced waning participation in the last few years. The project still publishes a newsletter each month, monitors the popularity of and recent changes to its articles, maintains a portal, and collects resources for contributors to use.
At the time of writing, this year's election has just closed after a two-week voting period. The eight seats were contested by 21 candidates. Of these, 15 have not been arbitrators (Beeblebrox, Count Iblis, Guerillero, Jc37, Keilana, Ks0stm, Kww, NuclearWarfare, Pgallert, RegentsPark, Richwales, Salvio giuliano, Timotheus Canens, Worm That Turned, and YOLO Swag); four candidates are sitting arbitrators (David Fuchs, Elen of the Roads, Jclemens, and Newyorkbrad); and two have previously served on the committee (Carcharoth and Coren). Four Wikimedia stewards from outside the English Wikipedia stepped forward as election scrutineers: Pundit, from the Polish Wikipedia; Teles, from the Portuguese Wikipedia; Quentinv57, from the French Wikipedia; and Mardetanha, from the Persian Wikipedia. The scrutineers' task is to ensure that the election is free of multiple votes from the same person, to tally the results, and to announce them. The full results are expected to be released within the next few days and will be reported in next week's edition of the Signpost.
The Visual Editor project – an attempt to create the first WMF-deployable WYSIWYG editor – will go live on its first Wikipedias imminently following nearly six months of testing on MediaWiki.org. A full explanatory blog post accompanied the news, explaining the project and its setup. Once a user has opted-in, the editor can handle basic formatting, headings and lists, while safely ignoring elements it is yet to understand, including references, categories, templates, tables and images. At the last count, approximately 2% of pages would break in some way if a user tried the Visual Editor on them; it is unclear whether any specific protection will be put in place beyond relying on editors to spot problems.
In celebration of Human Rights Day, we checked out WikiProject Human Rights. Started in February 2006, the project has grown to include over 3,000 articles, including 12 Featured Articles, 3 Featured Lists, 66 Good Articles, a large collection of Did You Know entries, and a few mentions "in the news". The project monitors listings of popular pages and cleanup tags. We interviewed Khazar2, Cirt, and Boud.
Ha, Gerda, you never fail to make me smile: that was a good catch. Thanks, but actually it's not so much my being nice as hoping that she is going to save me from premature madness ... :) Cheers DBaK (talk) 09:38, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
Now you made me smile, thank you! I hope she will save ... - While it was rather easy to tell you that you are an awesome Wikipedian (12 May), telling her was not so, and I could not do it during the election - certainly not sure if it would help or the opposite ;)
Thanks! I always find it a bit sad when we lose editors; I don't feel as if I will ever understand the dynamics of this place. Sorry, I am missing the point totally about he red cat - please enlighten me! (I am aware that if I was a proper person I could figure it out but asking you may be quicker!) cheers DBaK (talk) 10:13, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
I enjoy puns, cat as category, on my user ;) - close to the red cat, under "workshop", you find the dynamics, #1 "pride and prejudice", #2 "RfA" (termed an attack page in the middle of it), - my disillusioned answer: the red cat ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:21, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
Within the project, discussions included assessments after another year, date vandalism with the London Underground 1973 stock, deletions of Template:Infobox TfL Line and Template:Access icon and the featured article review of the London congestion charge
Within other related projects, relevant discussions included were on InterCity 125, Template:Access icon, unidentified station photo locations in London, LMS Hughes Crab, waterways and railways maps and photo requests of head offices.
Requests
If you want to post a request for help with an article, finding a photograph or seeking reference material, contact the editor
Seven days after the close of voting, the results of the recent Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) elections have been announced by two of the four stewards overseeing the election, Mardetanha and Pundit. Of the 21 candidates, 13 managed to gain positive support-to-oppose ratios, and the top eight will be appointed to two-year terms on the committee by Jimbo Wales, exercising one of his traditional responsibilities.
In the past year, we've tried to expand our horizons by looking at how WikiProjects work in other languages of Wikipedia. Following in the footsteps of our previously interviewed Czech and French projects, we visited the German Wikipedia to explore WikiProjekt Computerspiel (WikiProject Computer Games). The project dates back to November 2004 and has become the back-end of the Computer Games Portal, which covers all video games regardless of platform. Editors writing about computer games at the German Wikipedia deal with unique cultural and legal challenges, ranging from a lack of fair use precedents to the limited availability of games deemed harmful for youths to strong standards for the inclusion of material on the German Wikipedia.
This week's big story on the English Wikipedia is obviously the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (which, by the time you read this, may be renamed 2012 Connecticut school shooting). Quickly created and nominated for deletion not once but twice, and both times speedily kept, the article saw the expected flurry of edits (a look at the history suggests an average of at least one a minute over the first day and a half) and more than half a million page views on the first full day.
Four articles, three lists, and five images were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia this week, including a picture of a three-week old donkey (also known as an 'ass').
MediaWiki users (including Wikimedians) can now organise themselves into groups, receiving recognition and support-in-kind from the Wikimedia Foundation. The project, backed by new Wikimedia technical contributor coordinator Quim Gil, has seen five proposals lodged in its first week of operation. The idea of MediaWiki groups mimics that of Wikimedia User Groups.
Wishing everyone a very happy Christmas (or other seasonal and/or religious jollity). Hope you have an excellent day. With best wishes DBaK (talk) 02:36, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
As part of its new focus on core responsibilities, the Wikimedia Foundation is reforming its grant schemes so that they are more accessible to individual volunteers. The community is invited to look at proposals for a new scheme—for now called Individual engagement grants (IEGs)—which is due to kick off on January 15. On Meta, the community is once again debating the two new offline participation models—user groups (open membership groups designed to be easy to form) and thematic organizations (incorporated non-profits representing the Wikimedia movement and supporting work on a specific theme within or across countries). In a consultation process on Meta that will last until January 15, the community will be discussing WMF proposals for a new guideline on conflicts of interests concerning Wikimedia resources. The draft covers COI issues for both volunteers and organizations across the movement.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject A Song of Ice and Fire, which focuses on the eponymous series of high fantasy literature, the television series Game of Thrones, and related works by George R. R. Martin. The project was started in July 2006 and has grown to include 11 Good Articles maintained by a small yet enthusiastic band of editors.
Seven articles and two lists were promoted to 'featured' status this week, including List of battlecruisers. The article covers all of the battlecruisers—which were a type of warship similar in size to a battleship but with several defining characteristics—ever planned or constructed. The last British battlecruiser built, HMS Hood, is pictured at right.
Efforts were stepped up this week to sow a feeling of trust between the major parties with an interest in the future of the Toolserver. The tool- and bot-hosting server – more accurately servers – are currently operated by German chapter, Wikimedia Germany, with assistance from the Foundation and numerous volunteers, including long-time system administrator Daniel Baur (more commonly known by his pseudonym DaB). However, those parties have more recently failed to see eye-to-eye on the trajectory for the Toolserver, which is scheduled to be replaced by Wikimedia Labs in late 2013, with increasing concern about the tone of discussions.
In the impersonal, detached Colosseum that is Wikipedia, people find it much easier to put their thumbs down. As such, many people active in the Wikimedia movement have witnessed a precipitous decline in civil discourse. This is far from a new trend, yet many people would agree that it all seemed somehow worse in 2012.
A recent, poorly researched and poorly written story in the Register highlighted the perceived "cash rich" status of the Wikimedia movement. ... The Telegraph and Daily Dot, among others, have alleged that there are multiple links between the WMF, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, and Kazakhstan's government, which is, for all intents and purposes, a one-party non-democratic state.
On 27 December the Wikimedia Foundation announced the conclusion of their ninth annual fundraiser, which attracted more than 1.2 million donors. The appeal reached its goal of US$25 million, even though fundraising banners ran for only nine days.
In the first of two features, the Signpost this week looks back on 2012, a year when developers finally made inroads into three issues that had been put off for far too long (the need for editors to learn wiki-markup, the lack of a proper template language and the centralisation of data) but left all three projects far from finished.
Brion Vibber has been a Wikipedia editor for nearly 11 years and was the first person officially hired to work for the Wikimedia Foundation. He was instrumental in early development of the MediaWiki software and is now the lead software architect for the foundation's mobile development team.
At the beginning of the year, we began a series of interviews with editors who have worked hard to combat systemic bias through the creation of featured content; although we haven't seen six installments yet, we've also had some delightful interviews with people who write articles on some of our most core topics. Now, as we close the year, I would like to present some of my own musings on the state of featured content—especially as it pertains to systemic bias and core topics.
This week, we're celebrating the New Year from Times Square by interviewing WikiProject New York City. Since December 2004, WikiProject NYC has had the difficult task of maintaining articles about the largest city in the United States, many of which are also among the the most viewed articles on Wikipedia. The project is home to 22 Featured Articles, 7 Featured Lists, 32 pieces of Featured Media, and a lengthy list of Did You Know? entries.
Northeastern University researcher Brian Keegan analyzed the gathering of hundreds of Wikipedians to cover the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. ... A First Monday article reviews several aspects of the Wikipedia participation in the 18 January 2012, protests against SOPA and PIPA legislation in the USA. The paper focuses on the question of legitimacy, looking at how the Wikipedia community arrived at the decision to participate in those protests.
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 10,275 last month to 10,294 on December 15th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 93 is just ahead of WP:GM who have 73. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 57 out of a total number of 3,171 articles.
Currently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
Signpost
Just to let members know that the project was featured in the 3 December issue of the Signpost magazine. You can read that issue of the magazine here.
Happy New Year
It is the start of another year so I would like to take this opportunity to wish all members of the project a happy New Year.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The January 2013 articles selected below are an editor choice as there were no further suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered January 2013 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 12:56, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Hi. I am intrigued by your edit summary "I thought we were not supposed to do that any more", but am not quite sure what we are not supposed to be doing. Any clues? Regards. Bob1960evens (talk) 14:14, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Oops! Sorry, I should have been much clearer. Thanks you very much for asking. What I think we are not supposed to do is things like:
Temple Fortune Railway Station is a railway station at Temple Fortune
The Ruritanian Bald Tiger is a hairless tiger ...
A High-Pitched Vuvuzela is a vuvuzela of high pitch ...
in other words (and I think there is a proper policy and info on this somewhere could I but find it), if the article title says what the thing is, the lead doesn't have to contort itself to say it again in order to get a "The X is a YZ" type of first sentence out of it. So where it previously said "The River Rother is a river" (try saying that quickly several times when you've had a few) it now doesn't do that bit of definition, but just plunges on with the fact that it flows, which seems a jolly good thing for both the river and the article to do. No information is lost but the first sentence reads more comfortably, I feel. I think that when Wikipedia started getting larger and more formal there was a bit of a tendency to feel that you had to say "The X is a Y" as the very first thing and it's only more recently that people have started to move away, when appropriate, from adhering too strongly to that format. I hope this makes sense, albeit in a rambling and disjointed kind of way, and has helped. With best wishes DBaK (talk) 14:42, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Within the project, discussions included the featured article review of the London congestion charge, edits to London Buses route 24, date of publication of a 1938 LU stock emergency equipment diagram, Metropolitan Railway being TFA to mark the 150th anniversary of the tube and bus routes in station articles.
Within other related projects, relevant discussions included unidentified station photo locations in London, linking to train station, bus routes in station articles, template font problems, railway route boxes, primary road destinations in infoboxes and River Lee move discussions.
Requests
If you want to post a request for help with an article, finding a photograph or seeking reference material, contact the editor
Meta is the wiki that has coordinated a wide range of cross-project Wikimedia activities, such as the activities of stewards, the archiving of chapter reports, and WMF trustee elections. The project has long been an out-of-the-way corner for technocratic working groups, unaccountable mandarins, and in-house bureaucratic proceedings. Largely ignored by the editing communities of projects such as Wikipedia and organizations that serve them, Meta has evolved into a huge and relatively disorganized repository, where the few archivists running it also happen to be the main authors of some of its key documents. While Meta is well-designed for supporting the librarians and mandarins who stride along its corridors, visitors tend to find the site impenetrable—or so many people have argued over the past decade. This impenetrability runs counter to Meta's increasingly central role in the Wikimedia movement.
The dawning of a new year offers both a fresh slate and an opportunity to revisit our previous adventures. 2012 marked the fifth anniversary of the WikiProject Report and was the column's most productive year with 52 articles published. In addition to sharing the experiences of Wikipedia's many active projects, we expanded our scope to highlight unique projects from other languages of Wikipedia, and tracked down all of the former editors-in-chief of the Signpost for an introspective interview ... While last year's "Summer Sports Series" may have drawn yawns from some readers, a special report on "Neglected Geography" elicited more comments than any previous issue of the Report. Following in the footsteps of our past three recaps, we'll spend this week looking back at the trials and tribulations of the WikiProjects we encountered in 2012. Where are they now?
The past 12 months have seen a multitude of issues and events in the Wikimedia foundation, the movement at large, and the English Wikipedia. The movement, now in its second decade, is growing apace in its international reach, cultural and linguistic diversity, technical development, and financial complexity; and many factors have combined to produce what has in many ways been the biggest, most dynamic year in the movement's history. Looking back at 2012, we faced a difficult task in doing justice to all of the notable events in a single article; so the Signpost has selected just a few examples from outside the anglosphere, from the English Wikipedia, and from the Wikimedia Foundation, rather than attempting to cover every detail that happened.
Over the past year, 963 pieces of featured content were promoted. The most active of the featured content programs was featured article candidates (FAC), which promoted an average of 31 articles a month. This was followed by featured picture candidates (FPC; 28 a month). Coming in third was featured list candidates (FLC; 20 a month). Featured topic and featured portal candidates remained sluggish, each promoting fewer than 20 items over the year.
Following on from last week's reflections on 2012, this week the Technology report looks ahead to 2013, a year that will almost certainly be dominated by the juggernauts of Wikidata, Lua and the Visual Editor.
For taking the time to list school shootings. I appreciate the work you put into the list, and assume that most can be verified. What a guy. Thanks very much. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.246.171.217 (talk) 06:24, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
I sense a kindred spirit and yes definitely a North York Moors crusade. Thanks so much for those links, I'm learning as I go along and guessed some of my etiquette will not be quite right yet.
Cheers TrinaMc (talk) 21:29, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
After six years without creating a new class of content projects, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has finally expanded into a new area: travel. Wikivoyage was formally launched—though without a traditional ship's christening—on 15 January, having started as a beta trial on 10 November. Wikivoyage has been taken under the WMF's umbrella on the argument that information resources that help with travel are educational and therefore within the scope of the foundation's mission.g
On January 16, voting for the first round of the 2012 Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest will begin. Wikimedia editors with 75 edits or one project are eligible to vote to select their favorite image featured in 2012. ... On January 15, the foundation launched its latest grant scheme, called Individual Engagement Grants (IEG).
This week, we set off for the final frontier with WikiProject Astronomy. The project was started in August 2006 using the now-defunct WikiProject Space as inspiration. WikiProject Astronomy is home to 101 pieces of Featured material and 148 Good Articles maintained by a band of 186 members. The project maintains a portal, works on an assortment of vital astronomy articles, and provides resources for editors adding or requesting astronomy images.
Comforting those grieving after the loss of a loved one is an impossible task. How then, can an entire community be comforted? The Internet struggled to answer that question this week after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a celebrated free-culture activist, programmer, and Wikipedian at the age of 26.
Continuing our recap of the featured content promoted in 2012, this week the Signpost interviewed three editors, asking them about featured articles which stuck out in their minds. Two, Ian Rose and Graham Colm, are current featured article candidates (FAC) delegates, while Brian Boulton is an active featured article writer and reviewer.
The Wikidata client extension was successfully deployed to the Hungarian Wikipedia on 14 January, its team reports. The interwiki language links can now come from wikidata.org, though "manual" interwiki links remain functional, overriding those from the central repository.
The English Wikipedia's requests for adminship (RfA) process has entered another cycle of proposed reforms. Over the last three weeks, various proposals, ranging from as large as a transition to a representative democracy to as small as a required edit count and service length, have been debated on the RfA talk page. The total number of new administrators for 2012 was just 28, barely more than half of 2011's total and less than a quarter of 2009's total. The total number of unsuccessful RfAs has fallen as well. These declining numbers, which were described in what would now be considered a successful year (2010) as an emerging "wikigeneration gulf", have been coupled with a sharp decline in the number of active administrators since February 2008 (1,021), reaching a low of 653 in November 2012.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Linguistics. Started in January 2004, the project has grown to include 7 Featured Articles, 4 Featured Lists, 2 A-class Articles, and 15 Good Articles maintained by 43 members. The project's members keep an eye on several watchlists, maintain the linguistics category, and continue to build a collection of Did You Know? entries. The project is home to six task forces and works with WikiProject Languages and WikiProject Writing Systems.
This week, the Signpost's featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured topics. We interviewed Grapple X and GamerPro64, who are delegates at the featured topic candidates.
On 22 January, WMF staff and contractors switched incoming, non-cached requests (including edits) to the Foundation's newer data centre in Ashburn, Virginia, making it responsible for handling almost all regular traffic. For the first time since 2004, virtually no traffic will be handled by the WMF's other facility in Tampa, Florida.
On New Year's Day, the Daily Dot reported that a "massive Wikipedia hoax" had been exposed after more than five years. The article on the Bicholim conflict had been listed as a "Good Article" for the past half-decade, yet turned out to be an ingenious hoax. Created in July 2007 by User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a, the meticulously detailed piece was approved as a GA in October 2007. A subsequent submission for FA was unsuccessful, but failed to discover that the article's key sources were made up. While the User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a account then stopped editing, the hoax remained listed as a Good Article for five years, receiving in the region of 150 to 250 page views a month in 2012. It was finally nominated for deletion on 29 December 2012 by ShelfSkewed—who had discovered the hoax while doing work on Category:Articles with invalid ISBNs—and deleted the same day.
When we challenged the masters of WikiProject Chess to an interview, Sjakkalle answered our call. WikiProject Chess dates back to December 2003 and has grown to include 4 Featured Articles and 15 Good Articles maintained by over 100 members. The project typically operates independently of other WikiProjects, although the project would theoretically be a child of WikiProject Board and Table Games (interviewed in 2011). WikiProject Chess provides a collection of resources, seeks missing photographs of chess players, and helps determine ways that Wikipedia's coverage of chess can be expanded.
To many Wikimedians, the Khan Academy would seem like a close cousin: the academy is a non-profit educational website and a development of the massive open online course concept that has delivered over 227 million lessons in 22 different languages. Its mission is to give "a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere." This complements Wikipedia's stated goal to "imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge", then go and create that world. It should come as no surprise, then, that the highly successful GLAM-Wiki (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) initiative has partnered with the Khan Academy's Smarthistory project to further both its and Wikipedia's goals.
This week, the Signpost featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured lists. We interviewed FLC directors Giants2008 and The Rambling Man as well as active reviewer and writer PresN.
As reported in last week's "Technology Report", the WMF's data centre in Ashburn, Virginia took over responsibility for almost all of the remaining functions that had previously been handled by their old facility in Tampa, Florida on 22 January. The Signpost reported then that few problems had arisen since handover. Unfortunately that was not to remain the case, with reports of caching problems (which typically only affect anonymous users) starting to come in.
On February 12, 2012, news of Whitney Houston's death brought 425 hits per second to her Wikipedia article, the highest peak traffic on any article since at least January 2010. It is broadly known that Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website on the Internet, but the English Wikipedia now has over 4 million articles and 29 million total pages. Much less attention has been given to traffic patterns and trends in content viewed.
Article feedback, at least through talk pages, has been a part of Wikipedia since its inception in 2001. The use of these pages, though, has typically been limited to experienced editors who know how to use them.
This week, we took a trip to WikiProject Norway. Started in February 2005, WikiProject Norway has become the home for almost 34,000 articles about the world's best place to live, including 16 Featured Articles, 19 Featured Lists, and nearly 250 Good Articles. The project works on a to do list, maintains a categorization system, watches article alerts, and serves as a discussion forum.
This week, the Signpost's featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured portals, a small yet active part of the project. We interviewed FPOC directors Cirt and OhanaUnited.
On 30 January 2013, Kevin Morris in the Daily Dot summarised the bitter debates in Wikipedia around capitalisation or non-capitalisation of the word "into" in the title of the upcoming Star Trek film, Star Trek Into Darkness.
Following the deployment of the Wikidata client to the Hungarian Wikipedia last month, the client was also deployed to the Italian and Hebrew Wikipedias on Wednesday. The next target for the client, which automatically provides phase 1 functionality, is the English Wikipedia, with a deployment date of 11 February already set.
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 10,294 last month to 10,371 on January 28th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 93 is ahead of WP:GM who have 74. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 57 out of a total number of 3,185 articles.
Currently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
2011 Census
The Office for National Statistics have now published the detailed information from the 2011 Census for wards and parishes. The data can be searched for on their web site here. Would be good to get the information added to all of the relevant articles but this is a big job. If the article already has the 2001 census figures then it may be worth retaining these, in the text of the article, for comparison purposes.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The February 2013 articles selected below are an editor choice as there were no further suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
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Ha! Absolutely brilliant - you do indeed learn something every day, as they say! Thanks for that ... cheers DBaK (talk) 20:27, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
New-found not newfound
Hello again, after bumping along together this morning on our good, old friend M25! Just posted on this page and lo and behold you had posted on the same issue immediately ahead of me. I had not noticed until then. Cheers! – Gareth Griffith-Jones – The WelshBuzzard – 19:18, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
Wikipedia has a long, daresay storied history with hoaxes; our internal list documents 198 of the largest ones we have caught as of 4 January 2013. Why?
Foreign Policy has published a report on editing of the Wikipedia articles on the Senkaku Islands and Senkaku Islands dispute. The uninhabited islands are under the control of Japan, but China and Taiwan are asserting rival territorial claims. Tensions have risen of late—and not just in the waters surrounding the actual islands.
Wikimedia UK, the non-profit organization devoted to furthering the goals of the Wikimedia movement in the United Kingdom, has published the findings of a governance review conducted by Compass Partnership.
at my talk for a poem and a pic ;) - I thought the pic would be good on the Main page on Ash Wednesday, but not so Teh Community ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:26, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
...and my response was not fast; should have seen me in my heyday...I would have protected before you made the request ;). I like your username, btw, and can rlate to it, especially the 'knackered' part. Cheers and, well, happy editing. Lectonar (talk) 17:07, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
Hi there. Thank you for thinking of me. In fact, my interest in QK is pretty much concluded now, although I do still watch the article. I'm sorry to say that I don't have anything useful to add to this gentleman's enquiry - it must be annoying for him, though, if we don't fix it! I have responded there but I'm afraid it adds little. Thanks and best wishes DBaK (talk) 08:57, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
Hello DBAK, quite a few people use |publisher= incorrectly, and I have seen this on a recent edit of yours too. If your are unsure which to use, please use |work= or |newspaper= only, as nine-time-out-of-ten this is more likely to be correct. For example |work=BBC News Online or |work=The Guardian; the metadata will then be accurate and will be formatted correctly in the right place and using italics. Hope that helps and happy editing, —Sladen (talk) 12:25, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
Ah, thanks, didn't know - I will read up on this. Thanks very much, and sorry for any annoyance I've caused. Cheers DBaK (talk) 12:35, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
This week, we put our life in the hands of WikiProject Airlines. Starting in July 2005, the project has improved articles relating to airline companies, alliances, destination lists, and travel benefit programs. WikiProject Airlines has accumulated over 4,000 pages, including 4 Featured Articles and 26 Good Articles.
As of time of writing, twenty wikis (including the English, French and Hungarian Wikipedias) are in the process of getting access to the Lua scripting language, an optional substitute for the clunky template code that exists at present.
On February 15, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) declared 'victory' in its counter-lawsuit against Internet Brands (IB), the owner of Wikitravel and the operator of several online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The lawsuit clears the last remaining hurdles for the WMF's new travel guide project, Wikivoyage.
Sue Gardner's visit to Australia sparked a number of interviews in the Australian press. An interview published in the Daily Telegraph on 12 February 2013, titled "Data plans 'unnerving': Wikipedia boss", saw Gardner comment on Australian plans to store personal internet and telephone data. The planned measure, intended to assist crime prevention, would involve internet service providers and mobile phone firms storing customer usage data for up to two years.
Hi, I've edited the licensing information re-included the photo, I hope this is now sufficient. I represent Alison at EMI Classics and have changed the image at her request. The image is licenced to EMIClassics for press and promotion.
Dear DBK - I too am charmed by the fact that LdP was at one time a grocer, but the WP mores is that the categories should only be used where the person involved was notable for the quality involved - if Lorenzo had started, for example, the first grocery chain in NY, he might have qualified, but I understand he was in fact a notable failure in the world of comestibles. However I see that the article Grocer has a list of famous grocers, so you might care to add Lorenzo there. Do come to the music festival - we would be delighted to see you there. Best, --Smerus (talk) 10:28, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
On 13 February 2013, PR Report, the German sister publication of PR Week, published an article announcing that PR agency Fleishman-Hillard was offering a new analysis tool enabling companies to assess their articles in the German-language Wikipedia: the Wikipedia Corporate Index (WCI).
"Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Production" by Jeff Loveland (a historian of encyclopedias) and Joseph Reagle situates Wikipedia within the context of encyclopedic production historically, arguing that the features that many claim to be unique about Wikipedia actually have roots in encyclopedias of the past.
The Wikimedia Commons 2012 Picture of the Year contest has ended, with the winner being Pair of Merops apiaster feeding, taken by Pierre Dalous. The picture shows a pair of European Bee-eaters in a mating ritual—the male bird (right) has tossed the wasp into the air, and he will eventually offer it to the female (left).
How can we measure the challenges facing a project or determine a WikiProject's productivity? Several prominent projects have been doing it for years: WikiWork.
Yes, I agree. I'll just do a bit more work on it before I shift it, because it will mean going around all the traps again. Oh, it's already after midnight in the Great South Land. Need more coffee at this rate!
I'm planning on doing some solid work on a number of the cathedral articles. I've worked on Birmingham, Bristol, Carlisle, Chester, Chichester, Wells.... I got started alphabetically and went oK until I reached Canterbury. And while I m more familiar with Canterbury than any other cathedral, the state of the article was so appalling that I walked off whistling and did Carlisle instead. Then someone asked me to go to Chester and buy into the bun-fight that was going on.... I think it had to do with the bell-ringers (we bell-ringers get the blame for everything) . The systematic project stalled for a bit, but having been sweetly asked to write about the architecture of Wells, I couldn't resist, because it's just a teensy bit my favourite. By the time I got back to Canterbury, it was in infinitely better shape than when I left it. Amandajm (talk) 13:39, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
Thank you so much for the replies - interesting, and a great illumination of the wiki-process as it sometimes happens! Good luck with it all, cheers DBaK (talk) 13:41, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
BTW I really like you "Drive-by tagging is evil, wrong and lazy"!
There was an evil Australian bitch a few years back who cruised around the articles on villages and country towns deleting, tagging and leaving little messages for people in one pub, one creek, one general store locations telling them that their "family history" was irrelevant. She clocked up a huge number of edits without ever adding a useful sentence......
Hello, DisillusionedBitterAndKnackered. You have new messages at Amandajm's talk page. You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
Yes - it's a bit of a pet peeve of mine. I always think that if you can't put in even the most basic effort to help, then just tagging and running off is really little better than graffiti. DBaK (talk) 07:58, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 10,371 last month to 10,390 on February 25th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 95 is ahead of WP:GM who have 74. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 57 out of a total number of 3,190 articles.
Currently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
Interwiki links
There has been a major change this month to the way that interwiki links are handled with the introduction of Wikidata. Wikidata is a central place to record meta-data about an article and the initial phase was rolled out this month to cater for interwiki links. The links in the language area are served from this project and can be edited by use of the "edit links" icon at the bottom of the list. These links in articles are now redundant but if present override the information supplied by wikidata. Check each of the links to ensure that they exist and are correct on wikidata before removing the entry from an article. BOTs are in the process of removing these links from articles but will leave behind missing or conflicting links for someone to investigate and fix appropriately.
Be aware that when moving articles to change the destination for the en interwiki link on wikidata to point to the new article location. The redirect will normally take care of this
but if the original name is reused for a different article then other wikis will be pointing to an incorrect location.
Wikidate also does not handle section links in the interwiki link so these must remain as part of the article code.
Watchlists have been changed to give an extra option to Show/Hide changes to wikidata entries for articles on the watchlist.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The February 2013 articles selected below are an editor choice as there were no further suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Delivered March 2013 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 08:37, 3 March 2013 (UTC)
Middlesbrough and Dunkirk
Hi this is historyman53. I noticed the article on twinning Middlesbrough with Dunkirk and started to research the claim of 25% of ships coming from Teessport. First let me apologise for trying to edit before talking. Never done this before and really had no idea about how to edit or protocol. Your source is the Evening Gazette article which is not verifiable. I've checked the Dunkirk small boats register. 1 boat out of 192 was built at Smiths dock. Not a single destroyer or corvette was built here either. Will continue to plow through the records but sadly I don't think we teessiders can lay claim to 25%. Certainly the ships didn't actually sail from Teesport so I assume the claim is that they were built up here.Historyman53 (talk) 13:47, 3 March 2013 (UTC)
Thanks very much for the useful and interesting note. Please don't apologize - Wikipedia is a very odd place when you first come here and it takes some getting used to! The key thing is that we are now communicating. The best place to do this is definitely on Talk pages rather than inside the actual article itself. :) I'm sorry if I got a bit snarky about this - I should have been more tolerant.
Now, given that you've done all this work and that so far all there is on the pro-link side is the one journalist's article, I'm happy to agree that - pending any better evidence! - the claim should not stand. I would support an attempt to remove it or, at the very least, to initially challenge the verifiability of the source with a view to either removing it or marking it as needing a cite.
The way forward with this, rather than either just zap it straight out or comment on it in-article, is probably to raise it on the article's own Talk page at Talk:Middlesbrough and then we can make sure that what's going on is understood and agreed. Wikipedia editors (with some notable exceptions!) are usually pretty open-minded and helpful if it's discussed properly. I am happy to raise it for you, if you would like, or please raise it yourself and I can chip in with a comment if it seems helpful. When you do you might want to check if you are logged in or not - if you want to be identified at historyman53 you should log in as that, whereas in this edit above you're identified by your IP address only.
I hope this all helps, and please either let me know if you'd like me to take it up, or go ahead yourself - I have the page watched so I'll see changes. Thanks for all your efforts and best wishes, DBaK (talk) 08:20, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
Hi again DBaK, I'm sure I'll get the hang of this eventually but it is far from straightforward. At this moment I'm not even sure wether I'm replying to you or not! Just out of personal interest I'll continue to check all the ships but it's getting increasingly involved! I have an abiding interest in most history and it grieves me to see generalisations become truth just by being repeated often enough. Robin Hood etc being a case in point. I Would be grateful if you would do the 'necessary' to question the entry. Must educate myself regarding all the etiquette and user name/ip address.Historyman53 (talk) 11:44, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
Ha! Thanks for the note and yep, definitely not straightforward! You are indeed replying to me, and you are logged in, and you got the sig right with the four tildes ~~~~ so this is all great! Much more importantly, you've got the ideas and the commitment and have probably saved the article from error ... this is actually much more important than the technical stuff, which anyone can learn as long as they have nothing more worthwhile to do! :) We could talk another time about getting into it but for now, I'll just say yes I will be delighted to start on this for you. I feel it's the least I can do seeing as how I was a bit challenging at first. I am a bit busy right now but will do something with it as soon as possible. Cheers DBaK (talk) 12:48, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
I've had a go based on emailing the journalist and, perhaps more importantly, on what the council's own twinning page says. I hope it's an improvement! Best wishes DBaK (talk) 14:07, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
Hey DisillusionedBitterAndKnackered; I'm dropping you this note because you've used the article feedback tool in the last month or so. On Thursday and Friday the tool will be down for a major deployment; it should be up by Saturday, failing anything going wrong, and by Monday if something does :). Thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:35, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
Written on Skin
DBaK - how I envy you! - I am stranded in Kiev at the moment and wrote the stub in frustration at missing the show - Benjamin is I think a wonderful composer. Hopefully I will catch WoS sometime, somewhere....Best, --Smerus (talk) 06:13, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for your very helpful edits to A381 road, both the couple of minor ones in February (I had never realised that the mileage template could be adjectivised!) and particularly the one earlier this evening when you added 6622 bytes to the article. I find it incredible that an experienced editor would blank and redirect an article which had been peer-reviewed at B-class with not even so much as a talk note or an afd proposal, so once again thanks for your work, and also for the nice realistic perspective in the links on your userpage... Baldy Bill (sharpen the razor|see my reflection) 20:16, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
Thanks very much for the note, and you're welcome. Yes, the adjectival form in the convert template is good, isn't it? I was surprised by the redirection too, not least because it's from a very conscientious and busy editor whose work is superb. I think you may not have heard the last of this redirect but it would be good to give it a discussion. I think the article should be kept, but I am not sure about policy vs what I would, in this case, view more as common sense. Cheers DBaK (talk) 08:38, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the notice. I have noticed your good work as well. If I am alert, I will check the revision history when reviewing most vandalism. I have been caught a few times doing what my previous correspondent apparently did on another article. He reverted vandalism only to restore previous vandalism by a different IP user. I have seen ClueBot do this at least once as well. Donner60 (talk) 23:01, 2 April 2013 (UTC)
I now recall that it was a bit more complicated than just going back to a previous clean version. Some of the edits from at least two users may have been intended in good faith but they were awkward, even sounding pejorative. I kept the concept that his disease caused dwarfism but cleared away the awkward, if not pejorative, language. The main point is that I appreciate your notice. Donner60 (talk) 23:44, 2 April 2013 (UTC)
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 10,390 last month to 10,444 on March 27th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 97 is ahead of WP:GM who have 75. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 57 out of a total number of 3,208 articles.
Template:ClassiconCurrently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
Lua
Another change to the software last month sees the introduction of Lua for coding of templates. Those of you who edit templates may come across this with the introduction of the "#invoke" statement. The code is held in the new namespace of Module that was created for this purpose. One of the first places to show the change is the search screen that now has options to search the Module or the associated Module talk namespaces.
The use of Lua is expected to improve the speed of loading of pages with a large number of complex templates. The heavily used complex templates are being targeted for early conversion to use Lua. Template:Tl and Template:Tl family of templates are among the first to receive attention. If you see any problems when conversion is made then report them to Technical Village Pump or to the talk page of the module involved.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The April 2013 articles selected below are an editor choice as there were no further suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Delivered April 2013 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 06:58, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
Oh, it's not your fault—the red error messages have only been introduced within the past month or so, since the citation templates switched to a Lua backend, so you didn't overlook anything. I should have poked around to find that option for the sic template rather than just stripping it out. Choess (talk) 23:34, 18 April 2013 (UTC)
St Paul's Cathedral, London, is a beautiful cathedral
Hello. I saw you reverted a change I made to St Paul's Cathedral. Your message was very kind, and I thought unusual for Wikipedia, though I doubt unusual for you.
Ooops. I may have to go and sit in the Stupid Corner for a while. Proper reply to follow, but for now I have reverted myself. Thanks and best wishes DBaK (talk) 08:06, 30 April 2013 (UTC)
DBaK has had enough for the moment, and will probably be back sooner or later. Thank you and au revoir. DBaK (talk) 09:05, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
US/aesthetic/typographical punctuation vs "logical"
You're right that predominant US usage (or at least as far as the style guides would have you believe) is to put full stops and commas inside quote marks. Some editors here will tell you that "all educated people" in the US do this. I suspect that anyone that's written a computer program or even an HTML document or such like might have different impulses on that. Equally, some US editors seem to want to do it with semicolons too, so I'm not so convinced that actual US usage is anything like so uniform.
talk
Thank you for not living your user name, but talking to articles, talking to users in a helpful way (Kathleen Ferrier), getting new users started, talking to self, - all with disillusioned (= good) sense, - you are an awesome Wikipedian!
Thanks to the contributions of our many members and supporters, WP:YORKS has become a leading local British WikiProject in terms of the total number of articles supported (up from 10,444 last month to 10,461 on April 27th). In the area of GAs WP:YORKS at 99 is ahead of WP:GM who have 76. WP:GM has the lead in FAs at 58 out of a total number of 3,229 articles.
Template:ClassiconCurrently we have thirty one Yorkshire featured articles:
The number has been kept deliberately low to give us a fighting chance of improving them to at least GA status, also so we can concentrate our efforts on these first.
Notifications
By the time you read this the new Notifications tool will be available for use. You will have a new Notifications tab under Preferences to enable the selection of which type of notification you want on web and which you want e-mailing about. The count of those selected for web delivery will be shown between your user page and talk page links at the top of each page. Just click on this number to see the notifications that are applicable to you. One the resulting page there is also a direct link to the new Notifications tab of your preferences.
The main noticeable change will be the disappearance of the big orange bar at the top when you get a new talk page message, it will now be just a discreet change to the notification count.
WikiProject Yorkshire Collaboration of the Month Project
The May 2013 articles selected below are an editor choice as there were no further suggestions from the project talk page.
The project is subscribed to a clean-up listing which lists articles tagged with various clean-up tags that need attention. The listing is refreshed by a bot on a regular basis.
Monitoring is essential Use the watchlist to keep an eye on changes to the project's articles so that vandalism and spamming can be removed as quickly as possible.
Moves Please be careful when performing articles moves and ensure that you also move all the talk sub-pages and update any image fair use rational. Otherwise the archives, to-do lists, assessment comments and GA reviews get lost and the image may be deleted as it has an incorrect FUR.
Comments, questions and suggestions about this, or any, issue of the newsletter are always welcome and can be made by pressing the feedback button below...
Would you like to write the next newsletter for WP:YORKS?? Please nominate yourself at WT:YORKS! New editors are always welcome!
Delivered May 2013 by ENewsBot. If you do not wish to receive the newsletter, please add an N to the column against your username on the Project Mainpage.
→ Please direct all enquiries regarding this newsletter to the WikiProject talk page. → Newsletter delivered by ENewsBot (info) · 10:07, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
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I was unaware of the usage you point out for such rationale comments in artcles themself (not surprising; there's so much to learn). *sigh....*
Please feel free to correctly reapply your comment. A bot I'm rabidly following around spotted your signature as something to be reverted. Sorry for removing your comment as well; I absolutely didn't mean to do a rude edit. Wishing you all the best and sorry for causing you this inconvenience. Fylbecatulous talk 12:35, 13 May 2012 (UTC).
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FeydHuxtable (talk) 11:31, 11 July 2012 (UTC)
Hello. You have a new message at Gareth Griffith-Jones's talk page. -- Gareth Griffith-Jones (talk) 07:08, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
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