Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-11-16/News and notes

News and notes

Kiswahili contest, new advisory board members, Foundation-l and more

Google sponsors a Kiswahili Wikipedia article-writing contest

An international outreach team at Google, in collaboration with the Swahili Wikipedia, is sponsoring a Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge. This is an article writing contest for university students, especially targeting universities in Kenya and Tanzania who have expressed interest in fielding student teams. Swahili Wikipedians involved include Mohammed George, Ndesanjo Macha, Oliver Stegen, and Samuel Klein.

The contest will run from November 25 until January 15, 2010. Participants receive points for new Swahili articles they created based on their quality. The top individuals and universities can win a laptop or a mobile phone, and participants who create at least 10 good articles will receive a certificate of participation. As of November 15, seven universities had registered to field official teams, and roughly 200 students had signed up to participate. University workshops introducing students and teachers to Wikipedia and the benefits of editing will be run this weekend in Nairobi (by Ndesanjo) and Dar es Salaam (by Ndesanjo and Mohammed). Individual registration will remain open for a while longer.

Craig Newmark, Domas Mituzas join WMF advisory board

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.org, joined the Foundation's advisory board this week. He was invited to be an advisor "because of his work as an innovator and evangelist and his understanding of Web-based communities".[1]

Former Wikimedia Trustee Domas Mituzas, a tech-team member and database engineer at Facebook, also joined the advisory board, bringing the total number of advisors to 17.

Foundation-l shut, re-opened

The mailing list for Wikimedia Foundation issues was closed to general discussion for nearly a week. Brion Vibber placed the list on emergency moderation after a discussion about the recent departure of a Foundation staffer devolved into an argument over acceptable use of the list, followed by a rapidly growing series of personal attacks.

List administrator Austin Hair announced his intent to leave the list on moderation, temporarily limiting posts to official announcements only, and renew the discussion on Meta about improving the quality and usability of the list.

Later that week, Austin and fellow administrator Ryan Lomonaco announced that the list would again be open to general discussion, with the following changes:

Individual moderation will be more readily used to enforce civil, productive discussion on the list. As deemed appropriate by the moderators, individuals will temporarily see their posts held for review before being sent to the list. Two posters, Thomas Dalton and Will Johnson, were put on moderation with the initial announcement.
A "soft" 30 message per month limit will be imposed, with those reaching the limit put on moderation; their posts will be reviewed and passed on at the administrators' discretion.

It is the hope of the list administrators that these changes will improve the signal:noise ratio of Foundation-l, making it a more productive forum than it has been recently.

New guidance on copying within Wikipedia

Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia was tagged as a guideline on November 11 by User:ThaddeusB. The page offers guidance on how to attribute the original author when copying text from one Wikipedia page to another. The guidance was largely written by User:Moonriddengirl, User:Flatscan, User:FT2 and User:MLauba. The impetus came from a discussion between Flatscan and Moonriddengirl, with Flatscan asking whether "a page named something like WP:Copying within Wikipedia would be useful? It would isolate the editing action from the motivation (e.g. merging or splitting) and move discussion away from Help talk:Merging, which is only relevant sometimes."

The pair worked on the page in Flatscan's user space, before moving it to Project space on October 7. After the page was promoted to Guideline status, a number of users queried the status change on process grounds. TenOfAllTrades responded "the discussion had an open policy RfC tag for two weeks before the unanimous close: [2]. The draft was also announced here at about the same time: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 68#Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia."