Wikipedia kills Virgin dead

So, starting at 0000Z on 12/28/2006, Virgin Unite, the charitable arm of Virgin Group, is matching donations to the Wikimedia Foundation as part of its current fundraising drive. As part of the matching agreement, the Foundation agreed to run a small thank-you at the top of each page with a link to Virgin Unite's website. The thank you note went live at 0000Z. At 0012Z, Virgin Unite's website died.

Wikimedia quickly changed the notice to point to a thank you comment hosted on Wikimedia's own (far more robust) servers, and Virgin Unite's site is back up again.

The moral of the story: If you offer to sponsor a matching program at Wikimedia to bring traffic to your site, make sure your site can handle the traffic.

Quietness

I have been uncharacteristically quiet in here lately. This is because my life away from the computer has been busy, and I haven't had much time to post here. Sorry.

Greg Maxwell recently pointed me in the direction of several useful bits of software for doing panorama processing, which I have been abusing to reprocess some pan-intended shots from my image archive. It's a long and tedious process, but it does yield nice results. I've also been uploading other stuff to Commons and popping it into articles where I can.

I've also offered both a bounty and a reward for articles on plants and animals. So far I've heard from a couple people who are trying to earn one of the awards.

The ArbCom elections

I left comments for ArbCom candidate Geogre on his talk page, answering his inquiry as to "why I am here" (here presumably being either Wikipedia or his talk page). He removed them, presumably because he is afraid that people will read them.

They are reproduced here, below. Geogre will no doubt accuse me again of personal attacks for doing so. If he does so, he accuses himself of personal attacks in the same breath, for the statements he has made about me are far more egregious than anything I say below.

I am here (on Wikipedia) for the reasons detailed in my candidate statement and elaborated on my candidate questions page. It pains me that you are unwilling to credit enough good faith to accept that the statements I have made in those locations are truthful representations of my intentions and beliefs, and definitely, in my mind, calls into question whether you should be an Arbitrator, or in fact have any role on Wikipedia other than author.

I am here (on your talk page) because you are once again running about Wikipedia spouting off falsehoods as if they are truths. The falsehood (which you have at least admitted on this page, but not, as far as I know, in the other places where you have presented it) about the timing of your pledge is merely one of the more minor of your misrepresentations; your persistent misrepresentations of my positions and my actions (as evidenced by your hostile and offensive questions on my candidate questions page) are far more serious. It is my considered opinion that a person who will stoop to misrepresentation because the truth is inconvenient is not the sort of person who should be serving on the Arbitration Committee. Neither is someone who would brazenly assume bad faith of another Wikipedian, as you did in your communications with Cyde a day or so back. And on this latter issue, especially, I believe you will find that Jimbo concurs with me.

You are certainly free to change your mind; you are not free to do so and then pretend that you didn't, and you are not free to use false statements as justification for why you should not be considered to have changed your mind. That privilege is apparently reserved to your not-quite-namesake in the Oval Office.

Some free advice, Geogre: make a more concerted effort to concern yourself with that which is actually true, and less of an effort convincing yourself (and others) of the truth of falsehoods. You'll benefit from it in the short, and the long, run. And people might not be so inclined to call you a liar. I need not remind you of the Latin legal maxim, "falsis in unum, falsis in omnibus".

I find it outrageous that people are willing to vote for this individual. He has no concern for the truth, a characteristic that one would think would be totally incompatible with serving in a quasijudicial capacity. That he has any support at all speaks volumes about the grave illness of Wikipedia's community.

Not dead yet!

Things have been a bit screwy around here lately; therefore, I haven't had time to finish up the post I'm working on right now. Maybe in a few more days.

At least I finished A Clash of Kings.

Lots of stuff, all mixed together!

I recently commented on the idea of automated page expirations. Someone mentioned the oft-promised dewiki stable versions proposal in respect to this. Almost immediately after hearing about stable versions I realized how powerful and useful they would be for Wikipedia. They were promised for delivery "soon"; the timetable was presented as sometime in October, maybe even earlier, right after single-user login, which was supposed to be available "very soon" in August. Well, it's November, almost December, and single-user login isn't here yet, and neither are stable versions. My patience is starting to wear thin....

Another commenter suggested that Wikipedia has too few editors to have "content administrators". Wikipedia has thousands of editors. I find it hard to believe that there aren't enough people in those thousands who would be willing to do that sort of work if asked. Wikipedia does a poor job of managing its volunteers, and especially of advertising ways that volunteers can help the project. There is some sort of weird belief that it's wrong to ask people to do things for the project, or expect people to hold to their promises to do things, once made. Are Wikipedians afraid of commitment? (Is this a consequence of the relatively young age of most Wikipedians?)

The discussion of this brough to mind another idea, one Greg Maxwell had: have a bot go through the database, marking (at a relatively slow rate) pages which lack sourcing with a tag that declares that the article is not sourced and will be deleted if not sourced within one month. Any page which, after that month, is still unsourced is then deleted. The tagging rate has to selected to balance the desire to get all articles sourced in a reasonable time (there are something like 250,000 articles which lack sourcing on the English Wikipedia) while at the same time not putting too much demand on the editors who know how to properly source material. Pretty much everyone I've talked to about this thinks it's a good idea. I believe the only reason Wikipedia is not currently doing this is the lack of a working enwiki replica on the toolserver (another issue the developers seem not to care about very much).

The Esperanza dispute that I wrote about was deftly deconflagrated by Kim Bruning, who quite wisely recognized that no consensus could possible arise from that train wreck of an MfD and closed it early. I understand that he was criticized for doing so by a few sore losers. Kim's a tough cookie, though; he can take the heat. I can only hope that in the long run some good comes out of the secondary discussion.

I've had several people ask me recently if they should run for ArbCom. Why are people asking me this? Maybe they should listen to what I had to say in Episode Five of Wikipedia Weekly about the elections and people who think they might want to run for Arbitrator. Still, I'm not happy about the current slate of candidates: of the thirty-one candidates who have declared so far, I really think that only two or three are qualified and suitable. There's maybe a half dozen more who I don't know well enough to know whether they're suitable or not; the rest are, in my eyes, unsuitable in some way or another, some very much so. There's five seats open, which means that the chances of electing an unqualified candidate are quite good. And while frankly I think the ArbCom is losing relevance, it still remains an important entity; it would certainly not be a good thing for the ArbCom to become home to one, or worse yet, several, people who have no business sitting in judgment on their fellow editors. (By the way, the people who've asked me have generally gotten back a generalized "meh". Nobody who I really think belongs on ArbCom has asked me if they should run. Fortunately, nobody who I really think shouldn't be on ArbCom has either: I haven't had the displeasure of telling someone that they really shouldn't run.)

In a related topic, Werdna mentioned to me that he's working on an essay on how to improve Wikipedia. He's pretty much spot on on a lot of the issues. I'm looking forward to seeing what his solutions are, beyond exhorting readers to behave differently.

Onto another topic entirely: in last week's Wikipedia Weekly we briefly talked about universal wiki markup languages. Some listener mentioned Wiki Creole to Andrew, who shared the link with me. This project is working on developing a subset wiki markup that would be supported across multiple platforms and allow editors moving from wiki to wiki to use the same basic markup set no matter where they are. A MediaWiki implementation is promised. I noticed they've not made the MediaWiki mistake of using quotes for both bold and italics, but they still have the equals problem (both of which introduce unlimited lookahead, although in the equals case it's at least bounded to end of line instead of end of document, and the equals problem can be avoided if you have reasonable error recovery semantics, which MediaWiki doesn't).

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone (in the US, at least). Don't forget to check out next week's Wikipedia Weekly on Monday!