User talk:SpeedReader/Archive 5

• Public Domain Day: Why the year 2019 is so significant
  Public Domain Day—January 1, 2014—gives me an opportunity to reflect on this important asset, mandated by the Constitution of the United States.

• Traffic report: Tragedy and television
  The various maladies that befall humanity got some well-known faces this week: the death of the well-liked actor James Avery topped the list, but Michael Schumacher, who is in a coma after a skiing accident, also drew attention.

• Technology report: Gearing up for the Architecture Summit
  MediaWiki developers will be meeting in San Francisco on January 23–24 for an Architecture Summit.

• News and notes: WMF employee forced out over "paid advocacy editing"
  On 8 January, the Wikimedia Foundation notified the Wikimedia-l mailing list that Sarah Stierch, a popular Wikimedian and the Foundation's Program Evaluation Community Coordinator, was no longer an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, as a result of being paid to create articles on the English Wikipedia.

• Op-ed: WikiCup competition beginning a new year
  At the very start of the new year, 2014's WikiCup—an annual competition which has been held on Wikipedia in various forms since 2007—began.

• WikiProject report: Jumping into the television universe
  This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Television.

• Featured content: A portal to the wonderful world of technology
  Twelve articles, three lists, seven pictures, and a portal were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia in the last two weeks.

• News and notes: German chapter asks for "reworking" of Funds Dissemination Committee; should MP4 be allowed on Wikimedia sites?
  Wikimedia Germany, the largest national affiliate, has authored an extensive critique of the Funds Dissemination Committee's process for issuing funding recommendations for the various large organizations in the movement.

• Technology report: Architecture Summit schedule published
  The proposed schedule for the MediaWiki Archicture Summit has been published. The two main plenary sessions will be about HTML templating, and Service-oriented architecture.

• Op-ed: Licensed for reuse? Citing open-access sources in Wikipedia articles
  It is heavily ironic that two decades after the World Wide Web was started — largely to make it easier to share scholarly research — most of our past and present research publications are still hidden behind paywalls for private profit. The bitter twist is that the vast majority of this research is publicly funded, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide each year.

• In the media: Is Google hurting Wikipedia traffic?; "Wikipedia-Mania" in the New York Times
  Wikipedia's recent decline in readership, possibly due to Google's Knowledge Graph. ... Judith Newman in the New York Times asks "What Does Judith Newman Have to Do to Get a Page?"

• Traffic report: The Hours are Ours
  We now can get a far more accurate picture of which short surges in popularity are likely natural and which are not.

• WikiProject report: WikiProject Sociology
  This week, we studied human social behavior with the folks at WikiProject Sociology.

• Book review: Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries from Across the Known Multiverse
  A particularly esoteric anthology of speculative fiction, filled with imaginary Wikipedia entries from, as the introduction puts it, "the many Wikipedias across the Multiverse."

• News and notes: Modification of WMF protection brought to Arbcom
  The Wikimedia Foundation's Director of Community Advocacy's application of pending changes level two on the article Conventional PCI—an action taken under its rarely used office actions policy—has escalated to the Arbitration Committee after an editor upgraded it to full protection.

• Featured content: Dr. Watson, I presume
  Fifteen articles, nine lists, twenty pictures, and one topic were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia over the last two weeks.

• Special report: The few who write Wikipedia
  On 15 January, Wikipedia turned thirteen years old. In that time, this site has grown from a small site that was known to only a select few to one of the most popular websites on the internet. At the same time, recent data suggests that there is a power curve among users, where the comparative few who are writing most of Wikipedia have most of the edits. The result of this is that there is going to be bias in what is created, and how we deal with it as Wikipedians is indicative of the future of the site. Furthermore, this brings up what we have to do in order to combat this bias, as there are many ideas, but the question is whether they will work or not.

• Technology report: Architecting the future of MediaWiki
  This week we're interviewing Brion Vibber about the then-upcoming Architecture Summit. Brion is a long time Wikipedian, the first employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, and currently the lead software architect working with the mobile team.

• In the media: Wikipedia for robots; Wikipedia—a temperamental teenager
  An article in USA Today announced that a European-funded project called RoboEarth that is designed to give robots a mechanism by which to access information to dispense.

• Traffic report: No show for the Globes
  While the 71st Golden Globe Awards, held on 12 January, had an impact on the top 25, their presence was largely absent from the Top 10. With the exception of Best Actor winner Leonardo DiCaprio, the only Golden Globe entrants in the Top 10 are films that would have been there anyway.

• Traffic report: Six strikes out
  There are times when this job is hard. As an analogy, imagine navigating in fog at night, except you don't know where you are, you don't know where you want to go, and your flashlight keeps dying on you.

• WikiProject report: Special report: Contesting contests
  Contests have existed almost as long as the English Wikipedia. Contestants have expanded hundreds of articles and made tens of thousands of edits. Although it may seem as though there aren't any negatives to contests, they have occasionally become a divisive topic on the English Wikipedia.

• News and notes: Wiki-PR defends itself, condemns Wikipedia's actions
  Wiki-PR, a public relations agency, whose employees used a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts to create, edit, and maintain several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients, has told Business Insider that it was demonized by the online encyclopedia. Jordan French, Wiki-PR's CEO, said he believes the Wikimedia Foundation "painted" his company to look like an "evil entity" that is "scrubbing truths from Wikipedia".

• Arbitration report: Kafziel case closed; Kww admonished by motion
  The Kafziel case has been closed, with Kafziel losing his administrator status as a result.

• Recent research: Translation assignments, weasel words, and Wikipedia's content in its later years
  An author experimented with "a promising type of assignment in formal translator training which involves translating and publishing Wikipedia articles", in three courses with students at the University of Warsaw.

• Traffic report: Six strikes out
  There are times when this job is hard. As an analogy, imagine navigating in fog at night, except you don't know where you are, you don't know where you want to go, and your flashlight keeps dying on you.

• WikiProject report: Special report: Contesting contests
  Contests have existed almost as long as the English Wikipedia. Contestants have expanded hundreds of articles and made tens of thousands of edits. Although it may seem as though there aren't any negatives to contests, they have occasionally become a divisive topic on the English Wikipedia.

• News and notes: Wiki-PR defends itself, condemns Wikipedia's actions
  Wiki-PR, a public relations agency, whose employees used a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts to create, edit, and maintain several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients, has told Business Insider that it was demonized by the online encyclopedia. Jordan French, Wiki-PR's CEO, said he believes the Wikimedia Foundation "painted" his company to look like an "evil entity" that is "scrubbing truths from Wikipedia".

• Arbitration report: Kafziel case closed; Kww admonished by motion
  The Kafziel case has been closed, with Kafziel losing his administrator status as a result.

• Recent research: Translation assignments, weasel words, and Wikipedia's content in its later years
  An author experimented with "a promising type of assignment in formal translator training which involves translating and publishing Wikipedia articles", in three courses with students at the University of Warsaw.

• In the media: WikiVIP; Art Feminism; Medical articles; PR manipulation; Azerbaijani Wikipedia
  As reported in various media outlets this week, including The Next Web and The Daily Dot, this past week, Wikimedia Commons and various language Wikipedias are working together to encourage subjects of Wikipedia articles to record a 10-second clip of their voice to be appended to their Wikipedia article.

• Technology report: Left with no choice
  Software evolution does not always mean that features are being added. It also means that old fat is being trimmed. It is no different for MediaWiki.

• News and notes: WMF bites the bullet on affiliation and FDC funding, elevates Wikimedia user groups
  In a bold move, the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees has announced a major change in policy concerning affiliated groups in the worldwide movement, and FDC funding levels to eligible chapters and thematic organizations over the next two years. Both decisions were published last Tuesday after considerable post-meeting consultation with the FDC and the Affiliations Committee (AffCom). The core of the first decision is

• Featured content: Space selfie
  Thirteen articles, three lists, and twenty-five images were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia from 19 January to 1 February.

• Traffic report: Sports Day
  Two great sporting events, the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics, collide in one week, transforming the top ten into a festival of flying feet, a carnival of colliding caraniums and a bacchanal of bouncing balls, combined to influence Wikipedia's most popular articles last week.

• WikiProject report: Game Time in Russia
  In celebration of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, we revisited the team at WikiProject Russia to learn how the project has changed since our first interview in 2011.

• News and notes: Foundation takes aim at undisclosed paid editing; Greek Wikipedia editor faces down legal challenge
  The Wikimedia Foundation has proposed to modify the Wikimedia projects' Terms of use to specifically ban undisclosed paid editing. ... Dimitris Liourdis, a lawyer in training who moonlights as an administrator on the Greek Wikipedia, is embroiled in a legal dispute with a Greek politician over alleged edits made to his Wikipedia article.

• Technology report: ULS Comeback
  Runa Bhattacharjee has notified the community that the Foundation is ready to turn the Universal Language Selector back on.

• WikiProject report: Countering Systemic Bias
  WikiProject Countering System Bias aims to combat imbalanced coverage while encouraging neglected cultural perspectives and points of view, both in articles and in the larger Wikipedia community. As you'll see from the varied experiences and motivations of our nine respondents, the biases that the folks at WP CSB tackle run the full gamut of human characteristics and dispositions. The interview that follows unveils many of Wikipedia's greatest shortcomings.

• Featured content: Holotype
  Five articles, seven lists, forty-three pictures, and two portals were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia in the last two weeks.

• Traffic report: Chilly Valentines
  Valentines Day got a somewhat muted reception this week, overshadowed by continuing coverage of the Winter Olympics in Sochi and the death of Shirley Temple.

Hello SpeedReader:

WikiProject AFC is holding a month long Backlog Elimination Drive!
The goal of this drive is to eliminate the backlog of unreviewed articles. The drive is running from March 1, 2014 to March 31, 2014.

Awards will be given out for all reviewers participating in the drive in the form of barnstars at the end of the drive.
There is a backlog of over 1600 articles, so start reviewing articles! Visit the drive's page and help out!

A new version of our AfC helper script has been released! It includes many bug fixes, new improvements and features, code enhancements, and more. If you want to see a full list of changes, visit the changelog. Please report bugs and feature requests there, too! Thanks.
Posted by Northamerica1000 (talk) on 02:12, 28 February 2014 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk), on behalf of WikiProject Articles for creation

• Forum: Should Wikimedia modify its terms of use to require disclosure?
  About a week ago, the Wikimedia Foundation proposed to modify the Wikimedia projects' terms of use to specifically ban paid editing, by adding a new clause titled "Paid contributions without disclosure". We have asked two users, one in favor of the measure (Smallbones) and one opposed (Pete Forsyth), to contribute their opinions on the matter.

• Featured content: Odin salutes you
  Eight articles, three lists, and nine pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia last week.

• WikiProject report: Racking brains with neuroscience
  This week, we found three Ph.D.s willing to give us a crash course on WikiProject Neuroscience.

• Special report: Diary of a protester: Wikimedian perishes in Ukrainian unrest
  Ukraine has been gripped by widespread protests over the past three months. Due to a decision by former president Viktor Yanukovych—at Russia's urging—to abandon integration with the European Union, the country was (and in many ways still is) split between the Europe-favoring Ukrainian-speaking western half and the Russian-speaking east and south. Hundreds have died during the unrest, leaving thousands of family members and friends to bury their loved ones. This week our Wikimedian colleagues in Ukraine are facing that challenge after the death of one of their own.

• News and notes: Wikimedia chapters and communities challenge Commons' URAA policy
  Following a trend started by Wikimedia Israel, Wikimedia Argentina has published an open letter challenging the recent deletion of hundreds of images from the Commons under its policy on URAA-restored copyrights, relating to the United States' 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act.

• Traffic report: Snow big deal
  The 2014 Winter Olympics had more of an impact on the Top 25 than the Top 10, which had to shoulder old stalwarts like the death list, Reddit threads, TV shows and the eternal presence of Facebook; still, with four slots, it's the most searched topic on the list.

• Recent research: CSCW '14 retrospective; the impact of SOPA on deletionism
  The monthly roundup of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, edited jointly with the Wikimedia Research Committee.