Wikipedia:Goings-on/March 7, 2004

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Goings-on in the week starting Sunday March 7 2004

 * 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  ) about a possible introduction of a policy against more than three reverts, punishable by 24-hour bans. Further suggestions from Jimbo follow.
 * 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.
 * 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.


 * Administrators: Mkmcconn (March 7), Yacht (March 8), Isomorphic (March 9), Pfortuny, Wesley (March 11), Visorstuff, Lexor and Jay (March 12) have been made admins. Congratulations!

Arbitration committee

 * Arbitration committee fills out its arbitration policy and asks for comments and suggetions on Wikipedia talk:Arbitration policy.
 * Plautus satire vs Raul654 is completed. Plautus satire is banned from editing for one year - up to and including March 11, 2005 (8 in favor).  A lifetime ban was considered but rejected.
 * Matter of Wik: arbitrators vote on their decision; three findings of fact accepted, one rejected, voting on the remedy continues.
 * Irismeister: proposed findings of fact and remedy opened for arbitrators to vote on.
 * Matter of Anthony DiPierro: remains pending.
 * Various users and arbitrators wish to see "Mav v. 168" referred to the arbitration committee; Jimbo has so far not done this, and until the arbitration committee may accept cases without his referral, this cannot be considered.
 * Arbitrators formally refuse to hear Wik's request to have Darkelf banned (made February 14, 2004) as it is a political disupte and not suitable for arbitration.

WikiProjects

 * WikiProject Songs: A new table is created for use in articles about specific songs.
 * WikiProject Space Missions: Articles are being created for every space shuttle mission based upon public domain information from NASA, thanks largely to Theon.


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Articles featured on the Main Page


 * People's Republic of China (March 7)
 * Sperm whale (March 8)
 * Bathing machine (March 9)
 * Leonardo da Vinci (March 10)
 * LEGO (March 11)
 * Parthenon (March 12)
 * Nuclear weapon (March 13)


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Articles that gained "featured" status


 * LEGO (March 7)
 * Bioinformatics (March 8)
 * Isaac Asimov (March 13)

Pictures that gained "featured" status


 * Sand sculpture (March 13)
 * Lower Yellowstone Fall (March 13)
 * [[Media:Tamar Bridge and Brunel or Royal Albert Bridge panorama.jpg|Tamar and Brunel Bridges]] (March 13)


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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

 * 6 reverts a day poll
 * Sidebar poll
 * Chess diagrams
 * WikiProject Schools - opinions sought
 * Wiki-to-pdf converter
 * Arbitration policy is complete
 * Magnus Manske's list of encyclopedia topics
 * Python script to convert Wikipedia articles to LaTeX or PDF
 * How the web ruined the encyclopedia business on Slashdot
 * WikiStats Phase II

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
 * Gnutella
 * Replace sysops with one chief duty editor
 * "Honorary developers" to be allowed to assign user rights. See Developer access
 * Wikilyrics project (may violate copyright, if not use Wikisource)
 * RSS feeds and their application to watchlists
 * 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 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
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