Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-08-22
WikiProject VfD spurs controversy, record vote count
A VfD filed against Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedians for Decency received over 200 votes, a deluge of comments, personal attacks, accusations of sockpuppetry, and threats of requests for comment. As of press time, the vote was approximately 60% in favor of deletion, with 40% voting keep.
Nominated for vfd
The WikiProject was created by Agriculture on 16 August. 24 hours later, it was nominated for deletion by Zscout370. Zscout370 reasoned that the case was similar to a deleted WikiProject that dealt with Jewish bias, and the project would likely cause problems. Right away, a series of discussions erupted, including questions over whether certain images such as Image:Autofellatio 2.jpg violated Florida law, and whether the VfD nomination was in good faith and in concordance with Wikipedia policies on WikiProjects.
Record turnout
With over 200 votes, as well as a barrage of comments on many of the votes, votes were split up into 4-hour sections based on time of vote for the first day of voting, an unprecedented move in an attempt to get better control on voting and any possible sockpuppeting. Including all votes and comments, the VfD was approximately 218kb in size as of press time, and had been edited over 850 times. FCYTravis remarked, "I never thought it would blow up into what is probably the largest and most contentious VfD debate in Wikipedia history... even more so than GNAA."
Bad-faith membership?
Immediately after the VfD started, many users opposed to the ideas of the WikiProject nevertheless signed their name on the membership roster. Most of these new members joined either to make a point about what they believed as the group's double standards regarding censorship, or in some cases to attempt to tone down the group's point of view by swinging consensus to a more moderate perspective. MONGO complained that the users were acting in bad-faith, were hurting their reputation, and violating WP:POINT by joining. FCYTravis, who was one of those who joined, and attempted to change the group's point of view, noted in his defense, "I initially saw the VfD as almost a formality... but as it disintegrated into threats, attacks and vitriol... I ended up wishing it had never happened ... I think that if we (as Wikipedians) had simply joined the project in sufficient numbers to ensure it never would be capable of accomplishing its alleged goals of censorship, its proponents would realize they were fighting a war they couldn't possibly hope to win."
Jimbo Wales speaks out
On 18 August, Jimbo Wales voted "Weak Keep and Rename" on the issue, noting that the idea itself is not bad, but the group's name is decidedly pointed, and was a point of controversy during debate. Later that day, Ryan Delaney posted a message that Jimbo had made on the mailing list, that outlined Wales' belief that most of Wikipedia's nude images pose no legal problems under Florida law.
Not anti-nudity...anti-pornography
Many on both sides of the issue agreed that some sort of a consensus must be formed. Most members of the WikiProject clarified that they are not anti-nudity, simply anti-pornography, in the sense that unneeded, and often overtly sexual pictures should never be kept on Wikipedia, while tasteful nudity often has its place. User:JIP, who voted to delete the project, says that a distinction must be made between pictures like those on Pandora Peaks and the autofellatio image, which "is nothing but pornography for its own sake. It has no place in Wikipedia and must be deleted."
Civility by most, anarchy by few
Despite personal attacks, accusations of sockpuppets on both sides of the issue, and the creator of the WikiProject writing an angry message on his user page before supposedly leaving Wikipedia, some involved believe that most users conducted themselves in a fair and civil manner. MONGO, while lamenting the tactics of a few users, said that "the vast majority of the voters were civil and discussion ensued by many relating to potential legal issues and to where this project's true direction should be. Perhaps something can be salvaged from this exercise."
Wikipedia for promotional purposes?
Twice recently, television organizations have been accused of attempting to use Wikipedia for promotional purposes. The BBC recently added articles on Jamie Kane and Boy*d Upp, a fictional character and band existing in a BBC alternate-reality game. In another incident, G4's Attack of the Show program, to commemorate an appearance by Jimbo Wales, created User:Attackoftheshow, a user page which was used primarily as a sandbox for interested viewers to edit, raising questions over whether the usage was permissable or not.
Jamie Kane
On 12 August, a new user created an article about Jamie Kane, asserting that the fictional star of a boy band was real. The article was quickly tagged for speedy deletion, then taken to VfD. Uncle G and other editors changed the article, expanding it and making note that the band was fictional. The VfD subsequently failed, though a series of unsigned and unregistered users attempted to vote.
Later, an article on the fictional band, Boy*d Upp, was created by an IP address inside the BBC, assumed to be a BBC employee. This article was also tagged for VfD, and was deleted, then redirected to Jamie Kane. BBC confirmed that an employee had written the article, but denied that it was meant to promote the game:
- "The first posting was simply a case of a fan of the game getting into the spirit of alternative reality a little too much. The follow up posting was made by a fan of the game who happens to work in the BBC (where we've been beta-testing for the last month). This was unauthorized and made without the knowledge of anyone in the Jamie Kane Team or BBC Marketing. To confirm: the BBC would never use Wikipedia as a marketing tool."
Attack of the Show
On 16 August, G4 aired an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales. They created a user page for the show, where viewers could edit as they pleased. Vandalism ensued, and just a day after the episode aired, and over 1200 edits after the page was created, the page was protected. As of press time, the page is still protected to deal with vandalism.
Tony Sidaway protected the page immediately after it was created, but Jimbo unprotected it and instructed administrators to leave it open, because he had already talked with G4, and authorized the move.
Issues with using Wikipedia for marketing
From Wikipedia's point of view:
- if it successfully draws people's attention to the product, then it's highly likely that editors will notice it; once the editors get there they can begin to deal with it
- if the article is accurate, then it's possibly a legitimate article
- if it's not wiki-worthy, then the editing process will make it so, or delete it
From the marketers point of view the Wikipedia is a difficult choice:
- if the article is biased, then the Wikipedia's editors will balance it (it seems reasonable not to expect the marketers to much enjoy that balancing)
- in any case, once they've placed it in Wikipedia, the marketers will have lost control of it, and from their point of view it is totally a loose cannon. Again, they probably won't like that much.
Possibility of marketing spam in the future?
This raises the legitimate question of whether marketing spam may be a problem in the future. While this is a common occurrence on Special:Newpages patrol, a more confusing type of spamming such as the Jamie Kane articles may occur, where many users may be confused over whether the article's content is real, fake, or even vanity. Perhaps what is most reassuring is that all three pages were quickly found and taken care of. Nevertheless, this is a problem that may occur again in the near future.
New "Experimental Deletion" process started
Kim Bruning created a new experimentation page on 18 August to go along with Wikipedia:Deletion reform, Wikipedia:Experimental Deletion
The process
The page welcomes proposals from anyone; the purpose is to host experiments on different ways to delete pages. Current experiments include page-blanking, page moves, and categorization. The experiment's main goal is to help users learn about Mediawiki, and what is currently possible on Mediawiki to help alleviate the VfD overload.
Kim Bruning said of the page, "XD is a central page from where to run experiments with deletion. A bit like an X-plane contest. You can actually try the experiments out in your normal day to day New pages or RC patrol. It's fun to play with them, and the experiments turn out to not be very disruptive at all, so there's no harm in using them!"
News and Notes
Q3 Wikimedia Funding Drive starts
A $200,000 funding drive started on 19 August. The drive aims to pay for the significant server costs, which have risen dramatically recently. Nearly four days into the fundraiser, USD $44,413.07 has been raised.
Procedural changes
Two pages received minor procedural overhauls in the past week. Wikipedia:Requests for adminship has merged a self-nomination section of the page with the rest of the nominations, in order to make it easier for bureaucrats to check when an adminship can be carried out, and after many users pointed out that self-nomination is rarely a tool for bad-faith nominations anymore. In addition, Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion has been split into templates based on date, which are transcluded into the main deletion page. Both changes were driven by near-universal community consensus on their individual pages.
Briefly
- The Hungarian Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles.
- The French Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles.
- The Danish Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles.
- The Tamil Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
- The Telugu Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
- The Sanskrit Wikipedia dropped from the 1,000-article mark to only 600 articles with the deletion of nearly half its articles, mostly for having English-only content.
In the news
Wisconsin State Journal profiles Wikipedia
The Wisconsin State Journal ran an article on 16 August profiling Wikipedia. Among those interviewed include slambo, a Wisconsin native, and Theresa Knott. The article touched on the advantages and disadvantages of Wikipedia, including vandalism (and its quick reversion).
Citations in the news
Wikipedia was cited and/or referred to in many newspapers in the past week, most notably the Associated Press (article), the Minnesota Star-Tribune (article), the Rapid City Journal (article), and the Baltimore Sun (article).
New features proposed, record number of articles promoted
Two new ideas for highlighting featured content were proposed recently. Meanwhile a record 19 new featured articles were promoted, as well as 3 new featured lists and 1 new featured picture. 8 users also became admins.
Featured topics and sounds
Following the success of featured lists, Violetriga suggested a set of featured topics to highlight groups of related articles of high quality. Although there seems to be strong support for such an idea, the details are still being worked out on the talk page, along with a few suggestions for the first candidates.
Another proposal over at the village pump was to establish a process for selecting featured sounds, similar to featured pictures, that add significantly to articles. Though there was concern there may not currently be enough sound files on Wikipedia to make it viable, it was thought that introducing a featured status would encourage more editors to contribute sounds.
Admins
Eight users were granted admin status this week - Changlc (nom), RHaworth (nom), Ngb (nom), Jitse Niesen (nom), K1Bond007 (nom), Carnildo (nom), Dragons flight (nom), Fernando Rizo (nom), Ground Zero (nom) and Rick Block (nom). The RfA procedure also changed slightly: self-nominations are no longer separated from nominations by other users.
Featured content
Hot on the heels of the record breaking week on RfA (see previous story) comes a barrage of featured articles. Nineteen were promoted - Anarcho-capitalism, Chennai, Ted Radcliffe, Flag of Hong Kong, Holkham Hall, Supreme Court of the United States, Templon, Zambezi, Nirvana (band), Wario, Single Transferable Vote, Sealand, Surtsey, Jarmann M1884, Sylvia (ballet), Cat, Economy of India, Names of the Greeks and Sunset Boulevard (film) - beating the previous best of sixteen.
Of the featured list candidates, List of Indian state and union territory capitals, List of members of the Baseball Hall of Fame (chronological) and List of Test cricket records were promoted.
One featured picture candidate was promoted this week. Dze27 also created an RSS feed for the picture of the day.
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee closed five cases this week, including a case against Skyring that was reopened due to a request by Jimbo Wales, a case involving a user persistently removing material from libertarianism, and a user who had a restraining order issued against other editors.
User:Skyring
On 30 June, Skyring was banned for a month, with additional one-year bans on pages relating to the Australian government, as well as one year of personal attack parole, for excessive reverting and wiki-stalking on those pages. On 1 August, just a short time after this one-month ban expired, Jimmy Wales requested that the Arbitration Committee reopen the case, citing bad faith on Skyring's part.
The Arbitration Committee ruled on 12 August, in a 5-0 decision, that Skyring would be banned for one year for "wiki-stalking and acting in bad faith towards other contributors, as demonstrated in evidence." This ban is subject to reset upon the use of sockpuppets.
User:Alfrem
A strange case involving the removal of one particular phrase from the article libertarianism has resulted in a three-month ban on libertarianism-related articles.
Alfrem's case, opened on 13 July, was brought by Ta bu shi da yu, malathion, and harry491, who complained that Alfrem insisted on removing the words "political philosophy" from libertarianism. Alfrem did not present a case, or in any way speak in his own defense during the RfAr.
Citing edit wars with the three users who brought the RfAr, inappropriate editing habits, violation of the three revert rule, and use of an IP address sockpuppet during an Arbitration Committee-ordered temporary injunction ban, the committee unanimously banned Alfrem and any IP sockpuppets from editing libertarianism and all related articles for three months.
User:Mlorrey
Mlorrey, in one of the stranger arbitration cases in recent history, was banned from article and talk pages relating to gun control for one year, and was banned from Wikipedia completely pending resolution of a legal dispute with Meelar and Firebug. The legal dispute involves the invocation of the Hague Service Convention, which gives Mlorrey a temporary restraining order against Meelar and Firebug pending resolution of the case by an arbitrator agreed to by all parties involved.
User:Argyrosargyrou
Argyrosargyrou was banned for a period of six months by the Arbitration Committee on 21 August, after a complaint was brought against him by many editors on articles relating to Greek and Turkish articles. Citing POV forks of many articles, as well as his liberal use of sockpuppets, the Arbitration Committee also banned Argyrosargyrou from all Cyprus-related articles for an additional period of six months.
User:Onlytofind and User:Emico
A case involving Onlytofind and Emico's participation on Iglesia ni Cristo and related pages has resulted in both receiving short bans and personal attack parole. Onlytofind received a week's ban, as well as one year of personal attack parole. Meanwhile, Emico received a day's ban, and three months of personal attack parole. In addition, Emico was banned from a series of pages relating to the church for a period of one year, for removing parts of the article that he viewed POV.
User:-Ril-
The Arbitration Committee is currently hearing a case involving -Ril-. The RfAr involves -Ril-'s use of the speedy deletion tags, removal of talk page comments, and nomination of the article Authentic Matthew for deletion three times, as well as many other questioned tactics. In a controversial move, UninvitedCompany banned -Ril- indefinitely for disruption of Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedians for Decency, as well as the use of pornographic images inline on his user talk page (which was also protected). This ban came approximately eight days after -Ril- filed a request for comment against UninvitedCompany, in which a majority of users sided against -Ril-. At least one user claiming to be a sockpuppet of -Ril- protested this move on the RfAr page. This case is currently in the working phase.
Other cases
A case against Gabrielsimon is in the working phase, as are cases against Stevertigo, Rainbowwarrior1977, and DotSix, the name given to an IP address notoriously engaged in sockpuppetry, vandalism, and other offenses.