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| Volume 3, Issue 34 | 20 August 2007 | About the Signpost |
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RedditThis week, the Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense pages, chronicling vandalism and deleted content found to be humorous by some, were deleted, and restored just over nine hours later, leading to a lengthy discussion on the administrators' noticeboard, a deletion review, a miscellany for deletion listing, and an arbitration case.
Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense, more commonly known as BJAODN, is one of Wikipedia's older meta-pages, with edits as early as November 2001, and perhaps earlier. The page was created by Bryce Harrington (user page), with the comment, "We need a page where bad jokes and other deleted nonsense can rest in peace. So, here it is! [I'm half tempted to suggest keeping the jokes inline with the pages, as they must sorta give the encyclopedia some lively color. But I do know it'd just get carried away and turn into an encyclopedia of silliness, so look forward to frequent updates of this page. ;-) ]"
The page and its subpages have also been the subject of some controversy, with 6 deletion nominations and 3 deletion reviews to date. BJAODN was first nominated for deletion in March 2004, citing copyright concerns: Because BJAODN's content is usually copied-and-pasted from the articles where the text was added, with little-to-no attribution for individual authors, it is alleged to violate the terms of the GFDL. This nomination, made by a role account, was not taken seriously and the pages were kept. A second, less serious nomination in March 2007, also made by a role account, was speedily kept.
One week later, ^demon nominated the page for deletion, citing the GFDL concerns, repetitive humor, and most importantly, BLP concerns. However, the nomination was withdrawn; ^demon believed that the nomination was unlikely to be treated seriously as the nomination was made on March 31, just prior to April Fools' Day.
On May 29, most of the subpages of BJAODN were deleted by Jeffrey O. Gustafson due to GFDL concerns. An MFD discussion opened on May 31 for the deletion of all of BJAODN; that MFD was withdrawn while a deletion review opened the same day was closed early, endorsing deletion. Two days later, the subpages were undeleted by The Cunctator, and re-deleted by Jeffrey O. Gustafson; afterward, an additional deletion review was closed by Xoloz: "BJAODN should continue to exist, but it must be absolutely free of GFDL violations."
On Tuesday, August 14, Alkivar speedily deleted the BJAODN page and subpages and explained his rationale on the administrators' noticeboard:
After several months since the last time this was broached, and with little progress made, I have deleted BJAODN and its various subpages. Per WP:DENY, its mere presence promotes slander, copyright violation, spamming, and just plain old vandalism. As Jeffrey O. Gustafson brought up it is also a violation of GFDL. Since Jeff's initial deletion there has been little to no progress in attributing edits copied to BJAODN. As such it is time for this content to go.
Responses varied; many supported the deletions, others opposed the deletions, and some believed that the pages might be worth deleting but not without community discussion. Later that day, Georgewilliamherbert restored the main BJAODN page and many of its subpages. Xaosflux restored the rest of the subpages about 10 hours later, "to keep consistency in this matter", by ensuring that all, and not some, of the pages were undeleted while the DRV was ongoing.
After Georgewilliamherbert's restorations, a MFD nomination was opened. This MFD was closed soon afterward by Jeffrey O. Gustafson, directing discussion to the concurrent deletion review; this deletion review overturned the deletions, and relisted the pages again on MFD. The latest MFD nomination concluded with a decision to "basically delete" BJAODN, with the page being tagged as historical and renamed "Silly Things", with most of the subpages being deleted, with a few selected Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense-related pages remaining intact, at the discretion of other editors who may wish to nominate these for deletion in their own time.
After all the subpages were restored, and while the deletion review was ongoing, a request for arbitration was filed by Thatcher131, an uninvolved party who felt that Georgewilliamherbert's actions constituted wheel-warring:
There has been a growing disregard by admins for each others' actions, leading to minor wheel wars over various minor issues, and several other admins have commended Georgewilliamherbert for his action. It seems that the community of administrators will not take admonishments to avoid wheel-warring seriously until some admins get spanked. I will not be popular for suggesting this, but I suggest desyopping Georgewilliamherbert for 10 days for wheel-warring. Any temporary desysopping of Alkivar should be of a shorter duration as single instances of bad judgements are generally not punished. Admins need to have respect for each other's actions and consult before unilaterally overturning each other's actions, unless it is an emergency. I am not confident that the community of administrators will take the Committee's warnings about wheel-warring seriously unless there are definite consequences for overturning another admin on a non-emergency basis.
In Georgewilliamherbert's statement, he explained his thoughts on wheel-warring, and on his and Alkivar's actions:
Wheel warring requires two or more admins to use admin-specific functions in repeated conflicting actions. There has been no repeated use of admin functions. One operation was performed (delete) on a set of articles, and then one operation was performed (undelete) on a large subset of those. There have been no repeat deletes or repeat undeletes by anyone as of last I looked. Suggesting that responding to an admittedly highly controversial WP:BOLD admin action with an admin rollback constitutes wheel warring seems to me to be a misinterpretation of longstanding policy. Admins are allowed and encouraged to use their initiative (the longstanding BOLD policy), however that's coupled with a "...until someone pushes back..." caveat. I believed Alkivar went too far (once) and reverted (once).
It has been proposed in the DRV that this issue is too controversial for normal community process to come to a proper conclusion on what is to be done with the BJAODN pages, specifically referring to disagreements about what we can or must do about the GFDL issues with credit and edit histories. If so, it may be necessary for Arbcom (or higher authority such as Jimmy, the Board, etc) to review the situation and make a decision on what to do about it.
I believe that Alkivar and his supporters feel that this was too controversial and required admin-level initiative to simply impose a solution. I disagree - this is too controversial to simply impose an admin-level imposed solution. If we cannot come to a workable consensus on DRV or MFD or wherever it ends up, then I support using WP's processes and higher authority to answer the questions.
But trying to simply impose a BOLD solution to something of this magnitude, literally in the dark of the night, was very badly the wrong way to do this. It needed to be undone. It may well be true that either process or higher authority will decide to re-do the deletions, but a legitimate decision on this issue cannot come from any one admin's personal actions.
The request was accepted unanimously on August 18 with arbitrator Mackensen recusing himself from the case. The case is currently in the evidence phase.
Mastodon LinkedIn Facebook X (Twitter) RedditEarly on August 14, Wired News broke the story of WikiScanner, an online tool created by hacker Virgil Griffith that facilitates connecting the IP addresses of anonymous Wikipedia edits to the associated organizations. Griffith's tool combines the English Wikipedia database (current through August 4) with information from ip2location, which associates IP addresses with the specific organizations that control them. The initial Wired story described a few instances of dubious editing: edits from Diebold include the removal of criticism from the Diebold article, and edits from Wal-Mart include attempts to "burnish the company's image".
A companion post to Wired'sThreat Level blog by editor Kevin Poulsen, "Vote On the Most Shameful Wikipedia Spin Jobs", invited readers to use WikiScanner to find new examples, with a reddit-powered voting system for picking out the most egregious ones. Hundreds of examples have been submitted, many of which violate Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline. Several of the top-rated examples, including edits attributed to Diebold, the Church of Scientology, and the National Rifle Association, have received over 1000 votes, and new submissions continue to accumulate.
Other news services soon picked up the story from Wired. An article in Information Week added mention of edits by Fox News, cleaning up embarrassing information about anchor Shepard Smith. TechNewsWorld carried a tech-savvy piece that included analysis from law professor Eben Moglen; Moglen described WikiScanner as "a sudden burst of bright light and a social navigation tool for understanding the Web," and warns that "There are orders of magnitude more clever things on the way" in terms of tracking and analyzing online activity. U.S. News & World Report ran a piece that opened with "This could be very bad news for Wikipedia" and closed with sniping remarks by Wikipedia critic Andrew Keen. It also pointed out several early results from the Wired poll, including attempts by the Republican Party of Minnesota to turn the Harry Potter entry into a spoiler for the (recently released at the time) sixth book in the series, and edits from the New York Times vandalizing the George W. Bush article with the word "jerk".
Not to be outdone by the upstart Yanks, The Times of London reported that an editor from the BBC had changed Bush's middle name from "Walker" to "Wanker". On August 15 and 16, The Times ran a series of three articles (1, 2, 3) on WikiScanner, detailing edits by a host of major corporations and other organizations, among them Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil, AstraZeneca, Disney, Sony, the CIA, the Vatican, the U.S. Democratic Party, and Britain's Labour Party. One of the articles described the difficulty companies have managing their online reputations, with the potential for attempts at manipulation to backfire. The Times also ran an opinion column, "Wisdom? More like dumbness of the crowds", that praised WikiScanner as "an important development in bringing down a pernicious influence on our intellectual life."
BBC News also ran a WikiScanner story on August 15, covering vandalism from the CIA to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Democratic Party's unflattering edits about Rush Limbaugh and his listeners. The next day, the story also included a sidebar linking to an apologetic blog post by the BBC head of interactive news, explaining the BBC edits the story had neglected. The Guardian and The Telegraph also covered WikiScanner, focusing on established examples of edits by the CIA, political parties, and Fox News.
High-profile blogs also picked up the story early on, many focusing on politically sensitive examples. The conservative NewsBusters blog network highlighted the New York Times vandalism, while the liberal Huffington Post reported on the "misinformation tactics" of Fox News. Gaming sites Shacknews and GameSpot reported on attempts by game publisher Electronic Arts to remove negative information from related articles.
Apiece of satire, reporting that Rudy Giuliani is being awarded the "Virgil Griffith award" for self-serving edits, was reproduced on the blog Say Anything as real news, and reposted on a local television news station website as well.
The political satire blog Wonkette succinctly captured perhaps the most under-emphasized aspect of the WikiScanner story with a post entitled "CIA, Vatican, DCCC, Fox News, New York Times All Just Fucking Around On Wikipedia".
By August 16, many regional papers in the U.S. were carrying an Associated Press story on the scanner, a short piece focused more on the concept than specific editing examples. It ended with Jimbo's judgment on WikiScanner: "It is fabulous and I strongly support it." Television news also picked up that story that day. The liberal Crooks and Liars blog described a Fox News Channel story as an attempt "to undermine Wikipedia’s credibility"; the clip, hosted by Crooks and Liars, is actually a balanced piece that features an interview with Jimmy Wales, with fairly mild digs at Wikipedia's reliability and an upbeat take on the scanner's potential effect on Wikipedia.
MSNBC produced a substantial story for Countdown with Keith Olbermann featuring an interview with Wired editor Kevin Poulsen. Olbermann focused partly on edits by Fox News to Keith Olbermann. Poulsen put the magnitude of WikiScanner's impact in perspective, noting that Wired readers had submitted over 100 examples, "any one of which would have been worth a news item in itself a week ago." Another Wired editor, Nicholas Thompson, appeared on National Public Radio's Morning Edition.
Canada's CBC News also ran a story and associated TV news report; according to the anchor, "a scandal is growing over the integrity of [Wikipedia's] content". The coverage focused mainly on Canada-related editing revealed by WikiScanner—including over 10,000 edits made from Canadian government networks, such as an edit from the Canadian House of Commons changing Paul Martin from "Canada's 21st Prime Minister" to "Canada's worst Prime Minister". The piece also featured a clip of Wikipedian Simon Pulsifer.
Virgil Griffith, a hacker known for his previous involvement in a lawsuit brought by Blackboard Inc., built WikiScanner to "create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike" and "see what 'interesting organizations' (which I am neutral toward), are up to." He claims that "Every time I hear about a new security vulnerability, I look to see if it can be done on a massive scale and indexed." According to the FAQ, the results—in terms of media attention and juicy edits turned up—are just what Griffith expected. Griffith is also attempting to leverage WikiScanner publicity to improve his homepage's Google search result ranking for the term "Virgil"; it is currently the sixth result, and would have to compete with Wikipedia's Virgil for the top spot.
WikiScanner was intermittently unavailable after the first waves of news coverage, but Griffith has reportedly worked out his hosting arrangement to handle the expected traffic load from this point. Griffith was contacted about the possibility of hosting the scanner on the Wikimedia Toolserver. He claims it is not necessary but may consider it if traffic increases substantially.
Griffith, now entering graduate school for theoretical neurobiology at Caltech, developed WikiScanner with support from his former employer the Sante Fe Institute. The funding and sponsorship of WikiScanner became the subject of the top "hot" item on the Wired Spin Job poll for several hours on August 17 when Kevin Poulsen of Wired blogged about this edit by Wikimedia Foundation employee Vishal-WMF. Vishal removed a claim from Griffith's article, sourced to citizen journalism site OhMyNews, that Griffith had been hired by the Foundation to create WikiScanner. The OhMyNews article has since been corrected.
Wikipedia has developed a substantial article on WikiScanner over the past week, with over 150 edits. The article is tagged as a "current event", yet is also linked from the {{Wikipediahistory}} navigation template. The consensus among Wikipedians, however, is that the advent of WikiScanner is indeed an important event in Wikipedia's history.
Nearly a week after the first story broke, news coverage continues to pour in. The New York Times, which had been silent on the story to that point, ran a substantial article ("Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits") in the August 19 Sunday edition. In addition to a range of corporate edits, the Times reported embarrassing edits traced to its own IP addresses—as did many of the stories from major news organizations after the first round of coverage (including BBC, Fox News, and Associated Press). The New York Times piece, like the majority of WikiScanner stories, does not clearly convey the distinction between "anonymous" IP edits and logged-in pseudonymous edits. Many readers and viewers of WikiScanner stories are likely to come away with the impression that any edits to Wikipedia can be easily traced to the source.
Though investigations of malicious or self-interested editing were possible before, reporters have largely overlooked such investigative possibilities until now. Still, WikiScanner likely only scratches the surface of what lies buried in the Wikipedia database. Wikipedian essayist Durova put it thusly:
"Plan B", more sophisticated attempts at manipulating Wikipedia content, has correspondingly more severe consequences. Durova, who works extensively with sleuthing "the dark side" of Wikipedia, has implied that many more major stories await tech-savvy reporters who know how to comb Wikipedia's logs efficiently. The next generation of Wikipedia manipulation stories may be more than just "minor public relations disasters".
On the WikiScanner FAQ, Griffith hints that he has plans for other Wikipedia-related hacking projects in the near future. The FAQ mentions the possibility of porting the scanner to other language Wikipedias, such as German Wikipedia, but there is no word on if or when he plans to do so.
Mastodon LinkedIn Facebook X (Twitter) RedditThis week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Tom Kenny" and "Bobcat Goldthwait". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
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Mastodon LinkedIn Facebook X (Twitter) RedditBidding for Wikimania 2008 opened on Monday; bids will be accepted through Thursday, August 30, with a final decision scheduled for October 6. As of this time, three bids have been entered: Cape Town, Alexandria, and Atlanta.
Also on Monday, the jury for Wikimania 2008 was announced, with 17 voting members: Board members Jan-Bart de Vreede, Florence Devouard, and a board member yet to be determined, Wikimedia Special Advisor Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Communications Manager Sandra Ordonez, former board member and current Advisory Board member Angela Beesley, Advisory Board member Achal Prabhala, Juan David Ruiz, Dror, Kizu Naoko, Theodoranian, KJ, Phoebe Ayers, foundation Chapters Coordinator Delphine Ménard, and Austin Hair, with two potential members, Michael Snow and Samuel Klein, who have not yet accepted their membership.
Additionally, the jury will be aided by non-voting members: Advisory Board member Heather Ford, James Forrester, Andrew Lih (pending acceptance), Foundation employee Cary Bass, and other Board members will advise the jury.
This week, the Papiamentu Wikipedia reached 100 articles, making it the 200th Wikipedia to reach the 100 article barrier. Papiamentu, or Papiamento, is a Portuguese Creole mainly spoken on the islands of Bonaire and Curaçao, which are part of the Netherlands Antilles, and on Aruba, another self-governing part of the Netherlands. The language has 329,000 speakers worldwide.
In June 2005, the Nahuatl Wikipedia passed the 100 article mark, making it the 100th Wikipedia to reach 100 articles (see archived story). The Nahuatl Wikipedia now has over 3,200 articles. In June 2006, the Venetian Wikipedia passed 1,000 articles, making it the 100th Wikipedia to reach 1,000 articles (see archived story); it now contains nearly 5,500 articles.
Articles with geographical coordinates now include a built-in javascript-based mapping tool, WikiMiniAtlas. For an example, click on the globe icon to view a map of St. Petersburg, Florida, home of the Wikimedia Foundation: 27.782254, -82.667619. The tool was developed by Dschwen.
Mastodon LinkedIn Facebook X (Twitter) RedditNumerous articles, e.g. See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign, Wikipedia 'shows CIA page edits', Corporate editing of Wikipedia revealed: WikiScanner (see related story), a tool created by American hacker Virgil Griffith, caused a sensation when it was revealed, as it allows for anonymous edits to Wikipedia (for which the IP address is recorded) to be paired up with known IP addresses for various companies and other organisations. Government agencies, large multinational companies and political organisations are accused of making edits to Wikipedia that skew the content in their favour, either by removing or adjusting content in articles about them, or adding content to rivals' articles. WikiScanner can be found on Virgil's website.
Forget the Articles, Best Wikipedia Read Is Its Discussions: The author of this piece has found that reading the discussion pages of Wikipedia articles is a "vastly rewarding, slightly addictive, experience". Apart from the housekeeping discussions, he notes the variety and depth of discussions about article content on Wikipedia's talk pages, where editors can collaborate on working on the article. He also notes that talk pages are often used to raise incidents of policy violations.
Defending Wikipedia's Impolite Side: This article talks about Mike Godwin as the general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, a role that he has undertaken since last month. The first staff lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Godwin sees his role as laying the foundations for "massively democratic participatory media". In his work, he defends the Foundation from the plethora of legal traps that lie before it. He foresees a future where the online media is more mutable and changeable, and makes comments about those who seek to defame, and those who are defamed, on Wikipedia.
Other recent mentions of Wikipedia in the online press include:
Mastodon LinkedIn Facebook X (Twitter) RedditFour users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: RockMFR (nom), Graham87 (nom), Schutz (nom) and Bduke (nom).
Sixteen bots or bot tasks were approvedtobegin operating this week: HermesBot (task request), Computer (task request), HermesBot (task request), Rschen7754bot (task request), SmackBot (task request), SmackBot (task request), BoricuaBot (task request), OsamaKBOT (task request), PhotoCatBot (task request), HujiBot (task request), CSDWarnBot (task request), SineBot (task request) (a replacement for the late HagermanBot), RonaldBot (task request), HBC AIV helperbot4 (task request), OverlordQBot (task request) and HermesBot (task request).
Sixteen articles were promoted to featured status last week: Plymouth Colony (nom), History of Texas A&M University (nom), Inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre (nom), Attack on Sydney Harbour (nom), Jackie Chan (nom), Peru (nom), Kingdom Hearts II (nom), Sky Blue Sky (nom), Through the Looking Glass (Lost) (nom), Autism (nom), The Simpsons (nom), Confederate government of Kentucky (nom), Vkhutemas (nom), William Shakespeare (nom), Pygmy Hippopotamus (nom) and Blood Sugar Sex Magik (nom).
One article was de-featured last week: Steve Dalkowski (nom).
Thirteen lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of Shin Lupin III episodes (nom), List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people/A (nom), Hilary Duff discography (nom), No Doubt discography (nom), List of Governors of Alabama (nom), List of Aston Villa F.C. players (nom), List of tallest buildings in Boston (nom), List of winners of the Boston Marathon (nom), List of counties in New Hampshire (nom), List of counties in Maine (nom), United States Secretary of Energy (nom), List of counties in Massachusetts (nom) and Amateur Achievement Award of the ASP (nom).
One list was de-featured last week: List of tallest buildings and structures in the Paris region (nom).
Noportals were promoted to featured status last week.
Notopics were promoted to featured status last week.
Two sounds were promoted to featured status last week: A pond of Spring Peepers and Wood Frogs.ⓘ and Roosevelt's speech after the Pearl Harbor attacks.ⓘ.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Postage stamps of Ireland, Report of 1800, Rail transport in India, Indonesia, Effects of Hurricane Isabel in Maryland and Washington, D.C., Architecture of Windows NT and Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Clerid Beetle, Battle of Normandy, Along the River During Qingming Festival, Broadway Tower, Praying Mantis, Bézier curve, and Eta Carinae Nebula.
Four pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.
Mastodon LinkedIn Facebook X (Twitter) RedditThis is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.43.0-wmf.13 (8eaf4e5), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active.
Mastodon LinkedIn Facebook X (Twitter) RedditThe Arbitration Committee accepted one new case this week, and closed three cases.
