Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-03-08/News and notes

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By Phoebe, Tilman Bayer and seresin

WMF financial statements

The Wikimedia Foundation Mid-Year Financial Statements (covering the period 1 July through 31 December 2009) are now posted to the WMF website. An FAQ replying to questions has also been posted.

According to Veronique Kessler, posting on Foundation-l:

The upshot is: The Wikimedia Foundation's financial situation continues to be strong; we have met our overall revenue goal for the year and projections say that we will exceed plan by about 50%. Expenses were underspent at the beginning of the year but are catching up and we project expenses to be close to the original plan, maybe a little higher.

Discussion on administrator recall

A Request for comments on the implementation of Community de-adminship is currently ongoing.

Flagged revisions update

A heated discussion was held recently about the status of flagged revisions on the mailing list Foundation-l.

Following the discussion, Jimmy Wales started a poll in his userspace about "whether we should ask the Foundation to simply turn on flagged revs in the form that the Germans use it."

DYK featured fake BLP

For six hours on 2 March, the "Did You Know" section on the main page presented a fake biography manufactured as a breaching experiment by one of the writers of the "On Wikipedia" blog, as part of their examinations of BLP issues. (Last month, the Signpost reported on their survey among the subjects of 26 randomly selected BLPs.) Jimbo Wales commented: Fascinating and sad. I'm really proud of some aspects of the saga, and obviously not at all happy with others.

BLPRFC Phase II closed

Phase II of a Request for Comment on Biographies of Living Persons (BLPs) was closed this week. The Wordsmith originally closed the RfC, but his closure was reverted by Coffee, as he felt that The Wordsmith was too involved to close the RfC. Father Goose nominally re-closed the RfC, affirming The Wordsmith's earlier closure.

The close found a consensus that a PROD-like system be created to deal with unreferenced BLPs. The Wordsmith also found consensus that mass deletions of the sort that precipitated the RfC (see archived story) were discouraged, as well as any automated deletion of old unreferenced BLPs or speedy deletion of new ones. Finally, he suggested that the details of the PROD-like process be finally crafted within two weeks of the closure; that a message be sent to all active WikiProjects urging them to participate in cleanup; and that a taskforce be created to organize efforts of clearing the backlog. The Sticky Prod Workshop was created to hammer out the final details of the BLP PROD process.

Briefly

Milestones

In the past month:

Czech Wikipedia

This week in history

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Re: the fake DYK: Perhaps BLPs should undergo a particularly thorough review at DYK and only be accepted if two reviewers agree. -- Ssilvers (talk) 02:18, 10 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ideally no BLP (or article, for that matter), should go up if there's not secondary verification of (at the very least) the veracity of the hook. Obviously this would discriminate against dead-tree-type subjects, but it's a far better method for quality control. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs(talk) 03:02, 10 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Is the BLP Bjadonned? Kayau Voting IS evil 11:48, 10 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
It's my impression that DYK reviewers do check the veracity of the hook. Regardless, any such proposal about the review process would not have caught this particular instance of hoaxing, because the violating material was added after the review process was complete. Powers T 13:42, 10 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
That is not correct. The whole article was a hoax (and according to its author contained "entirely unsourced rumors of murder") even before it was entered into DYK. Just one additional statement was added afterwards, and while it would have exacerbated the BLP problem if the article had been about a real person, it wasn't the only "violating material" by a long shot.
In the ANI discussion, many people saw the incident as an indication of problems with the DYK selection process.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 11:17, 12 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Your statements about what was in the article at the time of DYK selection are not supported by the link provided in the Signpost. Powers T 12:55, 12 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Which "statements about what was in the article at the time of DYK selection" do you mean? By "it was entered into DYK" I was referring to the entering of the link to Mike Handel into the Template:Did you know. Perhaps you need to read the link that I provided in the Signpost article a bit more attentively. Quote:
Mike Handel hit the main page at midnight UTC. Administrator Ucucha performed the update (Wikipedia)(WebCite), but there's no reason to believe he even read the article. If he did, the entirely unsourced rumors of murder surrounding Oxford biologist Mike Handel didn't faze him.
Reading the whole text will help you reassessing your claim that the article was not a hoax while it went through DYK review. Regarding your "impression", you might be interested in the fact that the user who closed the DYK review ("Length, date and hook verified") despite the sourcing concerns of other users has since been blocked as "Vandalism-only account: Hoaxes".
For further discussion of this issue, Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know#DYK_Hoax might be a better place. (See also the RfC there about restricting DYK review to trusted users.)
Regards, HaeB (talk) 13:48, 12 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
All I meant was that the hoaxer said he didn't add the murder allegations to the article until after the article was accepted for DYK, which is the point at which review of the article occurs. Powers T 17:10, 12 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If people are going to make fake newspaper scans, then there's nothing we can do without multiplying our manpower by 1000. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 17:28, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

...or significantly modifying or discarding Assume Good Faith as a founding principle of the site. - BanyanTree 00:52, 12 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Even if we increase our manpower by 1,000,000, there will be embarrassments like this. Given enough cunning & malice, any article on Wikipedia can be suborned with harmful content. IMHO, I think Wikipedians do a far better job of keeping that kind of content out than do our for-profit competitors; too bad that's not enough for some people. -- llywrch (talk) 22:22, 12 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

On the WMF budget

The news item is for the midyear budget and notes the time period covered, however the quote that follows uses the vague year and isn't apparent if it refers to the same time period or the 2009 year or the fiscal year. I think it would helpful to make that clear. -- Banjeboi 19:31, 11 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

i note that grant funds were returned, "due to lack of recipients for the funds" (actual vs. plan note j) really? 98.169.251.41 (talk) 17:04, 14 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]


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