Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-03-22/News and notes

Explicit image featured on Wikipedia's main page, despite request from Jimbo Wales
On 21 March, the German Wikipedia's home page featured the entry on Vulva as the "article of the day", including an explicit anatomical photo as part of the teaser. Unsurprisingly, this generated considerable controversy, with the discussion on the main page talk page alone surpassing 500 kB and at least 42 protest e-mails reaching the German OTRS team. Achim Raschka, describing himself as the main author of the article and a "40-year-old biologist with three children" justified the decision, mentioning the desire to demonstrate that it was possible to write "an objective, respectful, reference-based and adequate article" about such a topic, and defending his choice of the teaser image.

Alerted on his talk page on the English Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales commented "I'm astonished [the image is there, and not in a good way]" and shortly afterwards asked German Wikipedians to remove it: "I won't do anything directly here, but I beg you all to quickly remove this image from the home page and have a review of your processes to see how to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. This is not an issue of censorship, but as someone has said, a matter of the 'Principle of Least Astonishment'. This is my opinion, you may do with it as you wish." However, the image was not removed, and Jimbo Wales later contented himself with announcing his intention to discuss the issue with members of the German community on an upcoming trip to Berlin, threatening to climb the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man.

Outside Wikipedia, the issue attracted the interest of many bloggers and generated hundreds of (mostly amused) tweets. However, media coverage remained limited to Telepolis and a short mention in Spiegel online.

(See earlier Signpost coverage related to explicit images on Wikipedia: January 2009, May 2008, August 2007, September 2006.)

Briefly

 * The FlaggedRevs developing team invites users to test an implementation of Flagged protection, the configuration of the Flagged Revisions extension which is proposed to be deployed on the English Wikipedia.
 * In a blog post, TheDJ reported on recent progress with the usability initiative's template folding mechanism and template editor, an important part of its ongoing efforts to make the edit window more user-friendly. A preliminary version can now be tried out on prototype.wikimedia.org.
 * Credo Reference (formerly Xrefer), a US company that offers subscription-based online reference content, recently donated 100 free user accounts to Wikipedians to help them in their day-to-day research as Wikipedia editors. Distributed on a first come, first served basis among users with at least 600 article namespace edits and at least six months of editing, the maximum number of applications was reached within a few hours on 18 March.
 * Sue Gardner's reports to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation for December 2009 and January 2010 have been published.
 * As in recent years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been accepted as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

This week in history

 * 2005: Creative Commons unveils new license for wikis
 * 2007: Policy changes
 * 2009: Abuse Filter is enabled