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Wikipedia:Goings-on/March 7, 2004

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Goings-on in the week starting Sunday March 7 2004

  • Wikipedia:Goings-on (Sunday March 7): This page is started!
  • Wikipedia talk:Mailing lists: A poll on where meta-discussions should be held ends (9 March) with no consensus.
  • Thumbnailed images: A design competition continues on Meta to replace the grey thumbnail borders.
  • List of encyclopedia topics (Sunday March 7): Magnus Manske finishes uploading the 78 pages of links.
  • Wikipedia talk:How to revert a page to an earlier version: What originally started off as a suggested guideline has sparked discussion (mainly on the mailing list [1] [2] [3]) about a possible introduction of a policy against more than three reverts, punishable by 24-hour bans. Further suggestions from Jimbo follow [4].
  • User:Bird: It seems that this user is attempting to remove large amounts of content contributed by himself in the past. See also User:David Newton/Bird Dispute and on the mailing list [5] [6].
  • Wikipedia:List of empty images: Silsor calls for cleaning up of zero-length uploads.
  • Emmss Vandalism (March 9-11): large scale spambot vandalism at ko:, fy:, gl:, gn:, ja:, ms: and sq:. Measures now taken at the squid server level to block POST commands coming from the proxies used by the spambot. Andre Engels, Angela, Dori, Fuzheado, Jeronim, JorgeGG, Kowey, Maximus_Rex handle most of the damage. Tim Starling assists by deputizing administrators on the spot for the smaller Wikipedias.
  • Downtime (March 10): Wikipedia experiences about 1 hour of downtime due to a database crash.

Arbitration committee

WikiProjects

Articles featured on the Main Page

Articles that gained "featured" status

Pictures that gained "featured" status

On the mailing lists this week

Wikipedia-l, Wiken-l, Intlwiki-l, Wikitech-l and Wikilegal-l, 7-13 March.

News

  • Suda crashed
  • The developers prepare for the 1.2.0 release of Mediawiki
  • Bandwidth thieves are blocked from taking our images (+ related issues of fair use and lack of a way of getting the images). Worldhistory is unblocked
  • Proxies are blocked
  • New &action=purge feature
  • New squid server in Germany
  • Links caching has been turned off and the links table is being rebuilt
  • Changes to the links table are made as part of the new database schema, which should solve the issues that occur when renaming pages with a long edit history (won't be live for a few weeks)
  • The MIT paper (PDF) on Wikipedia and history flow will be presented at CHI 2004
  • The development policy now says developers must document their features
  • Penguin is doing extended burnin tests until Friday so Geoffrin will be here soon. Gunther is available again
  • New image format now allows formatting and links in the caption
  • DNS and Zwinger issues resolved
  • The Daily Telegraph are linking to Wikipedia a lot
  • NohatBot uploads recordings of IPA sounds
  • Requests for de-adminship renamed to Requests for review of admin actions
  • New pretty graphs

International

  • Spambot attacks
  • Jean-Luc Azra wants to start a Tok Pisin Wikipedia
  • Goran Kulenovic requested adminship on bs:
  • Borislav Manolov requested bureaucratship on bg:

Adverts/announcements/polls etc

Issues

  • Edit war policy
  • User:Bird. Jimbo recommends blocking and sannse attempts mediation
  • Jimbo supported the "protect on the version of the person not edit warring" idea
  • User:66.185.84.208/User:kchishol1970 unblocked
  • The meaning of consensus on VfD
  • Problems with the mediation committee including role confusion and access to IPs
  • Protection of 1729 (number)
  • Are inter-namespace redirects allowed?
  • Jesus Chirst and banning of offensive names
  • DNA
  • User:168... and arbitration
  • Eloquence's removal of Sam Spade from WP:RFA
  • Talk page spam
  • 3-revert rule - rule or policy?
  • GFDL section 7, CC-ND and other image licensing issues
  • Should "In the news" be on the main page?
  • Arbitration
  • Single point of failure and the need for a backup DB server
  • RickK/Wik mediation

Proposals

  • Special:Recent Vandalisms
  • Banning by cookie
  • Displaying randomly assigned account names instead of IPs
  • m:Gnutella
  • Replace sysops with one chief duty editor
  • "Honorary developers" to be allowed to assign user rights. See m:Developer access
  • Wikilyrics project (may violate copyright, if not use Wikisource)
  • RSS feeds and their application to watchlists
  • m:Edit throttling
  • New status of "registered, confirmed users" in between users and sysops
  • Require users to provide verifiable non-Yahoo/Hotmail email addresses
  • Policy juries
  • Edit throttling and per-article bans
  • 24 hour bans for reverting
  • Copyright of anonymous editors to be assigned to the Wikimedia Foundation
  • Using a TeX hieroglyphs module on Wikipedia
  • Requiring 3+ admins to approve bureaucrat-type actions
  • Parsing HTML-like tags
  • Notification to users when they break the 3-revert rule
  • Rewards for good behaviour
  • Giving wikiprojects wikimoney
  • Admins to have the ability to (temporarily) filter all edits which involve a certain domain
  • Using captchas to stop spamming (issues with non-spamming bot edits and patents)
  • Revert all of a user's edits with one click
  • Combined recent changes
  • Rollback function to allow deletion

Bugs/feature requests

  • Image:Bill Clinton.jpg is undeletable
  • Technical implementations for the 3 revert rule.
  • Wikipedia is down (fixed)
  • Inaccessible toolbar buttons on hu: (fixed)
  • French Wikipedia to switch to UTF-8 following a vote
  • Problems installing MediaWiki (try MediaWiki 1.2.0rc3 instead)
  • Subpages feature
  • Non-UTF, non-ASCII usernames cause problems with Special:Export (to be fixed before 1.2.0)
  • Image thumbnail feature bug (fixed in CVS)
  • Spell checker. See also m:WYSIWYG editor
  • LaTeX chess support (stalled by tag-dogmatism at Wikisophia)
  • Problems with accented characters in links
  • Problems with convertdb.php
  • Caching problems leading to no notification of edit conflicts

Miscellaneous

  • yahoopops can solve some issues with Yahoo mail
  • Timwi asked for temporary developer access
  • Do anons get talk page notification?
  • French bureaucrats
  • Should people edit languages they can't read?
  • Erik asked Jimbo to approve 24 hour bans for edit warring
  • Is dispute resolution process useful? Do we need less bureaucracy or less unilateralism?
  • Desysoppings should be announced
  • Differences between developer access and CVS access
  • Stats may not be accurate