Wikipedia:WikiProject WikipediaWeekly/CurrentTranscriptions/Episode5

This is the transcript of Wikipedia Weekly, Episode 5. These notes are typed from the released audio, and may contain a large number of typographical errors due to the speed at which we need to type to create them. If you find errors - which is very likely - please try to fix them.

Participants

• Host: Fuzheado (F)
• Panel: Daveydweeb (D), Zero1328 (Z), Kelly Martin (K), Walkerma (W), CableModem (C).

Transcript

Introduction

F: This is Wikipedia Weekly, Episode 5 for the week of November 13, 2006. Welcome to another episode of Wikipedia Weekly. I'm your host Andrew Lih, also known as User:Fuzheado on the English Wikipedia. We're coming to you this week with some new folks. So, on our panel this week, we have Daveydweeb, from Canberra, Australia...

D: Nice to be here.

F: We have Zero from Brisbane, Australia...

Z: Hey, how are ya? Nice to be here.

F: And we have Kelly Martin from the US state of Illinois.

K: Good morning, Andrew.

F: And later on, we will be having Martin Walker from upstate New York, also in the United States. This week we're going to talk about some interesting stories that have been breaking in the news. If you've heard our episode from last week, you would have heard Jason Calacanis talk a lot about his ideas on Wikipedia and funding, and banner ads. I just wanted to remind you about a special episode (transcript here) we released also this week, because we did a lot of interviews. In fact we did a 5-hour podcast marathon that pretty much broke every one of us. But we had something from the German users about a recent contest that they had, and we also had an extensive interview with Larry Sanger on the launch of Citizendium, so please do take a listen to those special interviews.

Hackers misuse Wikipedia

So, this week, we have some interesting stories, including the big one, which was one that many computer magazines reported, that hackers tried to trade on Wikipedia's reputation to distribute virus and worm programs. This is from the Signpost. The attack is described as a standard phishing attack, and an official-looking e-mail with a link to the fraudulent site was distributed to users. So the basic story was that, on the German Wikipedia, some malicious folks put a link to a site that had a virus on it. Is that right?

Z: Yeah. Apparently these guys fixed some new blast worm.

F: Well, I think that the problem was a lot of the media outlets had very sensational headlines, saying 'Wikipedia contains viruses', and it was just very alarmist in terms of the type of headlines going around. What I know about this story is that the German Wikipedia contained a link to a site called wikipedia-download.com, so the virus wasn't actually on Wikipedia itself, but was actually a link pointing to a site which had the virus. And then some hackers actually sent e-mail out to folks, saying 'Take a look at this site', and they had wikipedia-download.com pointed to in these e-mails. So there was some concern at that point about this kind of phishing attack that was going on.

Z: Especially since the word 'Wikipedia' was in the domain name, many people were tricked quite easily.

F: Right.

D: And a lot of people probably were also thinking of projects like Martin Walker's Wikipedia 0.5, which we'll be talking about later - so, CD editions of Wikipedia that you actually can download, legitimately.

F: Right. I mean even the URL for this podcast is 'WikipediaWeekly', so having 'Wikipedia' in the domain name instantly gives people the impression that it's somehow either endorsed or trusted with the Wikipedia name, but that's actually very dangerous.

K: Not to mention one of the more common requests that we see, for those of us who read Wikipedia's e-mail, is requests to download a copy of Wikipedia. So you see that name, people are going to go hit that really hard.

F: Yeah. So that domain name kind of cropped up overnight, folks didn't know a lot about it. After this whole issue came up, though, I think the domain registrars for wikipedia-download got a message from Wikipedia folks, or the Wikimedia Foundation folks. They were very cooperative in taking down that DNS record very quickly.

K: That domain is no longer registered.

F: Oh, so it's been put out of business.

D: The bad news, though, would be, Heise Security - the German security organisation - reports that only half a dozen virus solutions actually recognise the bugs. A number of other scanners didn't recognise it, including major ones.

F: Wow, so this was a new virus, or a new type of bug that wasn't detected by a lot of folks?

D: Not necessarily - it could be that they just didn't expect the vector of an attack. Because I get the impression that it was actually an infected image that was used to spread the virus.

F: Well, I'm glad to see that threat is gone at this point, but I think it certainly got a lot of people to scramble on what to do in the future. And we have to imagine that this is not the only instance of a link in all the Wikipedias linking to something phishy. So I would not be surprised if there were little mines sitting out there.

Arbitration Committe elections 2006

So our next story is arbitration committee elections begin in Wikipedia, with more than a dozen candidates currently signed up. In fact, many more than a dozen.

K: Twenty-six.

F: Twenty-six? Oh my. So Kelly was a former arbcom member, so maybe Kelly can talk a little bit about what this entails.

K: Well, if last year's elections are anything to go by - and they probably will be, it looks like they're being conducted about the same way as last year, although last year Jimbo threw a twist in it and maybe he'll throw another in it this year. But this year we have, I see at the moment twenty-six candidates who've declared their interest, at least as of the last time I refreshed the page - who knows what happened in the last half hour.

That sounds like a lot, considering there's only - I think - five seats open, but last year we had eight seats open and sixty-eight people declared candidacy. So, it's really not that unreasonable that we only have 26 right now. Most of the candidates are probably not very serious. There's been a few candidates that have actually been removed in the editorial process for clearly not meeting the requirements, and even one banned user. I believe that was the poser of the gentleman who was banned by Jimbo for using Wikipedia as a profit vector.

As usual, what happens with the arbitration committee is, we have the annual election. Last year we seated eight new arbitrators out of a board of fifteen, so you can see that over half the board was new. And as a result there was a big burst of activity right after the elections as is usually the case, but after a couple of months they tend to burn out or burn down at least, and it gets backed up. So by about this time of year, usually a few months before now, everyone's annoyed at how slow the arbitration committee is and everyone's like, "I can do a better job." And so they all line to do a better job...

Five of these people will be chosen, and they will discover that, oh god, this is terribly hard work. It's boring, it's tedious, it's gruelling. Why in the world these twenty six people have any interest at all in doing this is completely beyond me. Of course, I see this as someone who ran after having being volunteered by Jimbo.

F: Just to remind listeners what arbitration committee is, it's actually kind of the council of last resort, and we actually had a panel at Wikimania just to introduce folks to the people who sit on arbcom and what they do. And it's really not a court with any precedent-setting power.

K: No, in fact the arbitration committee refuses to let itself be called a court although people often think of it as one. The arbitration committee is either the delegated hand of Jimbo, which is how it was originally envisioned - to replace Jimbo as the person who deals with things when nobody else does - or, kind of a guiding council to make decisions that need to be made, but the community is unable to make on its own.

Either way you look at it, it's an important body in some senses, and yet also less important than people think it is in other ways. I think a lot of these candidates are running for it cause they'll have made admin, although there's a couple of non-admins running, so that's the next thing to do. They could go for bureaucrat but that's not very interesting, so they'll go for arbcom.

The arbitration committee work is mind-wrenching, it is gruelling... but why anyone would do this is a mystery to me, especially since there's a couple of people on this list I'm looking at who are well known and quite good article authors, and I would like to chase them away to get them to take their names off this list, because if they go on arbcom they're going to have to choose between being an arbitrator and being an article writer. Nobody has been able to do both.

[transcript ends: 8:59]

[Full length of this episode is 1:06:34]